display all the ideas for this combination of texts
4 ideas
| 17193 | True ideas intrinsically involve the highest degree of certainty [Spinoza] |
| Full Idea: No one who has a true idea is ignorant that a true idea involves the highest certitude; to have a true idea signifying just this, to know a thing perfectly or as well as possible. | |
| From: Baruch de Spinoza (The Ethics [1675], II Pr 43) | |
| A reaction: This wildly optimistic view is found in rationalists of the period. Rationalism only becomes tolerable if fallibilism is added to it. See Bonjour. |
| 21863 | You only know you are certain of something when you actually are certain of it [Spinoza] |
| Full Idea: Who can know that he understands some thing unless he first understands it? That is, who can know that he is certain about some thing unless he is first certain about it? | |
| From: Baruch de Spinoza (The Ethics [1675], II Pr 43S) | |
| A reaction: This seems to beg the question, which concerns how you get to the state of full understanding or certainty in the first place. Spinoza thinks only certainty counts as knowledge, which seems to derive from Descartes. I prefer Peirce. |
| 17199 | A man who assents without doubt to a falsehood is not certain, but lacks a cause to make him waver [Spinoza] |
| Full Idea: When we say that a man assents to what is false and does not doubt it, we do not say that he is certain, but merely that he does not doubt, that is, that he assents to what is false, because there are no causes sufficient to make his imagination waver. | |
| From: Baruch de Spinoza (The Ethics [1675], II Pr 49) | |
| A reaction: This is a seventeenth century rationalist desperate to say that the reason can deliver certainty, in the face of idiots who are totally certain about astrology, fairies and what not. Vain hope, I'm afraid. Fallibilist rationalism is required. |
| 5638 | 'I think' is useless, because it is contingent, and limited to the first person [Spinoza, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: The proposition 'I think' was useless to Spinoza, because it expresses a merely contingent proposition, where certainty must be founded in necessity, and because it refers to the first person, when truth comes from rising above our own mentality. | |
| From: report of Baruch de Spinoza (The Ethics [1675]) by Roger Scruton - Short History of Modern Philosophy Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: I find both of these criticisms very appealing. One might simply say that the starting point of philosophy is not the process of thinking, but the contents of thinking. Descartes' move is like astronomers becoming obsessed with telescopes. |