The Metaphysics of imagination in Spinoza: from the critique of non-being to the theory of ideas of imagination

• Grant number: 17/21722-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: May 01, 2018
• End date: August 28, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - Metaphysics
• Principal Investigator: Marilena de Souza Chauí
• Grantee: Nastassja Saramago de Araujo Pugliese
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Imagination, for Spinoza, is both a kind of knowledge and the origin of false ideas and fictional ideas. This double capacity of imagination to know and to feign is epistemically problematic because imagining does not necessarily imply in knowing nor in fantasizing. If, on the one hand, imagination alone does not offer a criterion according to which one can distinguish between a true idea and a false idea, or between an adequate idea and an inadequate idea, on the other hand, we can find in the imaginative activity itself the causes that explain its apparently antithetical functions. The purpose of the present proposal is therefore to investigate the constitution or the nature of imagination, distinguishing between the different kinds of ideas of imagination. To this end, the research will be structured in two parts: (1) the analysis of the progression of the thesis on imagination of the early works and of the later works pointing out their similarities and differences, and (2) the analysis of Spinoza's critical engagement with the metaphysical theses of his predecessors and the philosophical disputations of his time. In the first part of the research, we will reconstruct the theses on imagination contained in the Short Treatise, the Cogitata Metaphysica, the Treatise on the Emendation, and compare those theses with the theory of imagination of both the Ethics and of the Theological Political-Treatise. Afterwards, we will contextualize the problem of the metaphysics of imagination of the early works (the critique of the notion of non-being) in metaphysical disputes of the late scholasticism of Suárez, the Dutch Cartesianism of Heereboord, and on the mathematical disputations of the Seventeenth Century. Our research will result in a detailed and historically contextualized commentary on Spinoza's theory of imagination. (AU)

Scientific publications

(References retrieved automatically from Web of Science and SciELO through information on FAPESP grants and their corresponding numbers as mentioned in the publications by the authors)

PUGLIESE, NASTASSJA. Monism and individuation in Anne Conway as a critique of Spinoza. BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, v. 27, n. 4, p. 15-pg., 2019-07-04. (17/21722-5)

PUGLIESE, NASTASSJA. Monism and individuation in Anne Conway as a critique of Spinoza. BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, v. 27, n. 4, SI, p. 771-785, JUL 4 2019. (17/21722-5)

PUGLIESE, NASTASSJA. The Reception of Classical Latin Literature in Early Modern Philosophy: the case of Ovid and Spinoza. ARCHAI-REVISTA DE ESTUDOS SOBRE AS ORIGENS DO PENSAMENTO OCIDENTAL, v. 25, 2019. (17/21722-5)