著者

木島 泰三

出版者

法政大学文学部

雑誌

法政大学文学部紀要 = Bulletin of the Faculty of Letters, Hosei University (ISSN:04412486)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.83, pp.41-57, 2021-09-30

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We have previously shown that Spinoza’s conatus can be characterized as divine self-predication. In this article, we argue that the self-reflexive characteristic of divine self-predication provides the foundation for ideas of ideas or reflexive ideas.In the first section, we show a plausible textual basis in Spinoza’s Ethics for our construction on ideas of ideas. From our reading, it follows that everything that has conatus also has reflexive ideas and that all our ideas or mental acts are accompanied by their reflexive ideas. But the latter implication of our interpretation seems to conflict our everyday experience of selective reflection of our mental acts or states. This is the problem that we are concerned with in the following sections.In the second section, we consider François Recanati’s contemporary account on the self-reflexive characteristic inherent in the verbal signs and Arnould’s ― a contemporary of Spinoza ― binary concepts of the explicit reflection and the implicit refection, which Recanati finds offers the basis for accounting how some reflexive ideas are explicit while others implicit.In the third section, we apply their concepts to Spinoza’s theory of ideas of ideas to address our problem.