Philosophical Review 119 (4):531-563 (2010)
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Abstract |
Spinoza's remarks about consciousness in the Ethics constitute two theories about conscious experience and knowledge. Several remarks, including 3p9 and 4p8, make the point that self knowledge—an especially valuable good for Spinoza—is not available to introspection. We are, as a matter of course, conscious of ourselves, but we do not, as a matter of course, know ourselves. A second group of remarks, all of which occur in part 5 of the Ethics, emphasizes a different point about consciousness and knowledge: the knowledge that distinguishes the minds of the most powerful or virtuous people is conscious. The characterization of human consciousness that underlies both theories is best understood as one on which a wide variety of ideas in human minds are conscious, and the intensity or degree of consciousness of a given idea is a function of its power. For human minds, because the power of any idea derives from the power of its causes and because many ideas have external causes, there are no grounds for taking the intensity of conscious experience to track a mind's power closely. Rather, as the second group of remarks suggests, power in a human mind tracks the degree to which knowledge characterizes a mind's conscious states
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Keywords | Analytic Philosophy Contemporary Philosophy General Interest |
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DOI | 10.1215/00318108-2010-013 |
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References found in this work BETA
The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Volume 1.René Descartes - 1984 - Cambridge University Press.
Die Philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz & C. I. Gerhardt - 1875 - Weidmann.
Spinoza's Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation.Edwin M. Curley - 1969 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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Citations of this work BETA
Two Ethical Ideals in Spinoza's Ethics: The Free Man and The Wise Man.Sanem Soyarslan - 2019 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (3):357-370.
Consciousness, Ideas of Ideas and Animation in Spinoza’s Ethics.Oberto Marrama - 2017 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (3):506-525.
Descartes on Will and Suspension of Judgment: Affectivity of the Reasons for Doubt.Jan Forsman - 2017 - In Gábor Boros, Judit Szalai & Oliver Istvan Toth (eds.), The Concept of Affectivity in Early Modern Philosophy. Budapest, Hungary: pp. 38-58.
A Spinozist Aesthetics of Affect and Its Political Implications.Christopher Davidson - 2017 - In Gábor Boros, Judit Szalai & Oliver Istvan Toth (eds.), The Concept of Affectivity in Early Modern Philosophy. Budapest, Hungary: Eötvös Loránd University Press. pp. 185-206.
Spinoza's Account of Blessedness Explored Through an Aristotelian Lens.Sanem Soyarslan - 2021 - Dialogue 60 (3):499-524.
View all 13 citations / Add more citations
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