The ontological foundations of knowledge in Spinoza (Benedictus de Spinoza)

This dissertation deals with Spinoza's notion of adequate ideas. From Spinoza's perspective, the adequate idea as God's essence entails absolute certainty. To know an idea adequately, one must reach the infinite and eternal aspects of God's essence. Only by doing so can one fulfill the criteria of truth, namely truth as coherence and truth as correspondence. A true idea is one which satisfies all the internal marks, and its ideatum as the physical image corresponds to every aspect of the thing.; I argue that the body plays a constitutive role in cognition. For Spinoza, the body is not subservient to the mind; mind and body are two sides of the same coin. Affects and conatus can both be attributed to the body.; The late Descartes believes that imagination cannot reach God's infinity. I contend that on account of conatus as the strife for freedom and infinity, the Spinozistic body is capable of perceiving different modes of space and eventually attaining virtue infinity. Thereafter, the intellect can intuit actual infinity as substance.; As for eternity, I reconstruct Spinoza's theory of belief with the intention to redeem its validity. A belief becomes true when it is objectively real and subjectively veracious. Moreover, I discuss the two laws of association. Conceiving ideas fortuitously and inadequately, the mind follows the natural law of association. As conatus intelligendi and active affects take shape at a later point, the mind relates ideas with necessity and follows the universal law of association. I further claim that in the third kind of knowledge the mind is in touch with two kinds of reality, one temporal and the other eternal. The eternal existence of the thing grounds its temporal existence.; Knowing God's eternal essence and existence involves grasping the thing's common notions and intuiting its concrete essence. The intuition at issue is an unconditional positing. As such, it grounds all subsequent propositional and conditional positing. I identify this intuition as the experience of God's eternal existence. The problems of eternity and infinity being solved, the knowledge entails absolute certainty.