In Spinoza ’ S Philosophy of Mind

Axiom 6 of Part I of Spinoza’s Ethics, in the most widely used English translation, reads: “a true idea must agree with its object.” Spinoza also claims in Part II of the Ethics that every idea has an object with which it is parallel in an “order and connection” of causes (E2p7, E2p11, E2p13)—and, indeed, with which it is identical or “one and same” (E2p7s, E2p21s). Jonathan Bennett has maintained that, because the parallelism and identity of idea and object entails their agreement, every idea must therefore be true for Spinoza— and, indeed, Spinoza explicitly states that all ideas, at least “insofar as they are related to God,” are true (E2p32). Yet one of the primary purposes of the Ethics is to overcome the prevalence of error—a state that seems, at least for him, to involve assent to ideas that misrepresent how things are and so are not true but false. Is Spinoza in error about the possibility of error in his own philosophy of mind? In what follows, I will first examine Spinoza’s explicit statements about error and conclude that they approach but do not fully answer the question of how false ideas—that is, misrepresentations—are possible. In pursuit of a fuller Spinozistic answer to this