Rosenthal, Michael

Senior Fellow: December 2021–February 2022

Research Project: The Shadow of Reason: Imagination, Language, and Scepticism in Spinoza

This project will argue that we can explain the structure of the imagination in Spinoza’s mature work, the Ethics, if we pay close attention to his use and critique of the late scholastic notion of a “being of reason” (ens rationis) in his early works. Although Spinoza rejects the metaphysics of the medieval doctrine of the analogy of being (analogia entis]), he adopts it for a very different purpose; namely, to explain the nature and function of the imagination. Some recent scholars have argued that Spinoza ultimately drops the notion of analogy from his mature system. In contrast, this project will argue that he transforms the notion of analogy in his theory of the imagination. It will show how we can use the notion of analogy to explain how imaginative signs are formed and how they are employed in understanding the world, and will also show how the analogical structure of the imagination explains the extent to which they are partly true and how the imagination might aid reason in discovering adequate ideas. Because the imagination is at the core of Spinoza’s account of language, this interpretation also attempts to explain how language sometimes functions to lead us astray and sometimes functions to help us to reason correctly in his critical explanations of religion, politics, and even philosophy itself. Thus, this interpretation of the imagination makes sense of how sceptical problems are generated and partly overcome in his system.

Michael Rosenthal is Grafstein Professor of Jewish Philosophy at the University of Toronto, Canada.