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September 2023 - August 2024
Ruben Noorloos is a historian of philosophy whose research centers on Spinoza and on early modern social epistemology. He received his doctorate from Central European University in 2022. His dissertation investigated Spinoza's often misunderstood doctrine of mind-body parallelism. During his PhD studies, he spent time as a visiting researcher at Humboldt University Berlin and at the University of Groningen. His research has been published in Analysis and the Journal of Philosophy of Education.
The Role of (Beings of) Reason in Spinoza’s Ethics
Spinoza is known as a 'rationalist', someone who believes that everything can be rationally explained. However, Spinoza's own discussions of reason tend to stress its limitations. Reason, as the 'second' kind of knowledge, operates by forming generalizations and by tracing the relations between things. For these reasons, it appears incapable of formulating what for Spinoza is the highest kind of metaphysical knowledge, which is knowledge of individual essences. Reason also depends on notions such as number, measure and order, which Spinoza in some of his writings describes as mere 'beings of reason' (entia rationis), but which nevertheless play important roles in his constructive thought. This project investigates what role beings of reason play in Spinoza's main work, the Ethics. In doing so, it aims to shed light on some of Spinoza's views about mind-body interaction and mind-body identity.