Spinoza on Universals

Like many prominent early moderns, Spinoza espouses a brand of nominalism about “abstractions and universals,” and he frequently warns against confusing universals with real things. While many of his conclusions about the status and origins of universals were increasingly common in the seventeenth century, Spinoza insists that the consequences of falsely reifying universals reach farther than his contemporaries recognized. Spinoza also tries to integrate his criticisms of reified universals into distinctive tenets of his own metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, and even ethics. At the same time, however, Spinoza employs universal-like categories in very reifying-sounding ways, raising concerns about whether Spinoza fully abides by his own admonitions. This too is part of an increasingly common pattern in early modern discussions of universals: reject mind-independent universals in one domain while appearing to tacitly accept them in others.