Spinozistic expression as signification
Date
01/01/2022Author
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Abstract
I propose a new interpretation of Spinoza’s obscure but important concept of ‘expression’. Any account of Spinozistic expression must be able to fulfil two principal requirements. First, it must be able to accommodate all the relevant cases of ‘to express’ (exprimire) posited by Spinoza in the Ethics. Second, it must be able to deal with the fact that for Spinoza all instances of ‘to express’ are instances of ‘to involve’ (involvere). By taking both ‘to express’ and ‘to involve’ as coextensive with ‘to conceive’, contemporary accounts of Spinozistic expression satisfy the latter requirement, but they fail to satisfy the former. In this article, I dispute the claim that for Spinoza ‘to express’ is coextensive with ‘to conceive’. I argue instead that Spinoza understands exprimire as natural signification: for Spinoza, ‘to express’ is coextensive with ‘to be a natural sign of’. I show that this interpretation is not only able to successfully deal with both requirements of Spinozistic expression, but also offers a novel and textually supported insight to Spinoza’s understanding and use of the elusive concept of ‘expression’.
Citation
Salgado Borge , A 2022 , ' Spinozistic expression as signification ' , British Journal for the History of Philosophy , vol. 30 , no. 1 , pp. 24-47 . https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2021.1953961
Publication
British Journal for the History of Philosophy
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0960-8788Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
Description
Funding information: This work was supported by the National Council of Science and Technology, Mexico [grant number 2018-000032-01EXTF-00013].Collections
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