Francesca Gambini

Abstract

Within a broader research project on the concept of relations in Spinoza’s philosophy, this first part analyzes the scholastic legacy, with particular attention to the notion of relation as an ens rationis and the concept of extrinsic denomination. The project investigates the relationship between Spinoza’s conception of relation and the medieval debate on the ontological status of relations, articulated through distinctions such as relatio realis vs. relatio rationis and relatio secundum esse vs. relatio secundum dici. It seeks to clarify how Spinoza adopts, reworks, or radicalizes this legacy, especially as transmitted through seventeenth-century Dutch manuals. Spinoza, across his corpus – from the Short Treatise to the Cogitata Metaphysica and the Ethics – explicitly includes relations among the entia rationis, particularly as extrinsic denominations: determinations that do not express a thing’s intrinsic nature but its being analogically denominated. While this aligns him with scholasticism, for which denominatio extrinseca qualifies a relation as purely rational, the project shows that Spinoza reorganizes this doctrine within his ontological and epistemological framework. The working hypothesis is that Spinoza’s reduction of many relations to entia rationis is not a devaluation of relation per se, but a critique of relations dependent on imaginative comparison and abstract universals. In this sense, relations are entia rationis when arising from the first kind of knowledge, confined to the ordo idearum, and gain full ontological status (as entia realia) when reflecting connections in both the order of ideas and the order of things.The research thus clarifies Spinoza’s position relative to medieval conceptualizations of relations, showing how he employs scholastic tools while radically restructuring the relationship between ontology and epistemology, a central aspect of his philosophy".