The Idea of the Idea, Consciousness, and Human Experience in Spinoza’s Ethics
January 13, 2026 Olivér István Tóth
Abstract This chapter defends the claim that Spinoza had a theory of consciousness against Garber (2021). The claim that Spinoza’s idea of the idea is the form of the idea, not because it represents the formal reality of the lower-order idea (Bennett 1984), but rather because it refers to the way in which a subject’s mind takes a representation of some modification of her body as representing...