Creating Rational Understanding

In the Ethics, Spinoza distinguishes two ways of thinking, imagining and reasoning. Both, he claims, give us knowledge or cognitio; but only reasoning yields truths. Drawing on the Theological-Political Treatise, this essay explores the differences between the epistemological norms guiding reasoning and those at work in imaginative practices such as history or prophecy, and asks how philosophers make the transition from one to the other. The norms of reasoning and of imagining are embodied in particular sets of social capacities and ways of life. Becoming more rational or learning to philosophise is a process of learning to live cooperatively.