The duplicity of imagination in Spinoza's philosophy

Abstract

The study of the concepts of error and privation leads to the conditions by which it is possible to attest the duplicity of the imagination in Spinoza. In Ethics II, the imaginative perceptions are related to the field of inadequacy in which the concept of error as privation is placed. However, in the same book Spinoza remarks that the human mind is not mistaken in imagining because the imagination, considered in itself, contains no error or privation. Then, it must be considered: the imagination belongs to the first kind of knowledge and this is the only cause of falsity, but the same imagination expresses, on the other hand, a positive element which cannot be defined by error or privation. How to understand these opposed positions? The BEPE-FAPESP research internship aims to study the relation of the spinozist conception of error / privation and the duplicity of the imagination. In order to increase the master's research (The definition of error as a privation of knowledge in the philosophy of Spinoza, FAPESP 2019 / 28118-8), our objective is to clarify the ambivalence according to which the imagination brings the falsity of knowledge, but at the same time it cannot be reduced to the concepts of error and privation. Thereby, this investigation intends to consider the concept of imagination in Spinoza's theory of knowledge, defining its double aspect and its relation to the false