Sánchez de León Serrano, José María
Senior Fellow: November 2018–September 2019
Research Project: Scepticism and Dogmatism in Spinoza's Thought
The geometrical method that Spinoza adopts in his Ethics is usually considered an example of conceptual rigour, insofar as it aims to deduce its propositions from first principles with logical necessity. Yet despite its rigour, this kind of exposition does not show how the first principles themselves are found. The geometrical method conceals the actual process through which the human mind, starting from its particular lived experience, attains knowledge of the first notions. As a consequence, the otherwise imposing edifice of the Ethics might appear to be a dogmatic construction based on arbitrary assumptions. This semblance of dogmatism increases when we consider the main concept on which this edifice is based. God, the starting point of the Ethics, has traditionally been taken to be the least self-evident and least clear of all notions. However, Spinoza seems to assume that the human mind already possesses clear knowledge of God’s essence before knowing anything else. Spinoza’s procedure in this regard still perplexes scholars, especially when considered vis-à-vis the sceptical worries that were common in European thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
José María Sánchez de León Serrano earned his PhD in philosophy at the Universität Heidelberg. Before coming to Hamburg, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.