Abstract

In this article, I develop an ‘aspectual’ reading of Spinoza’s doctrine of formal essence, objective being, existence and non-existence, and actuality of things that conforms to his monism understood as a one-level ontology. By an aspectual reading, I understand a reading that takes all these different qualifications to always refer to different aspects of one and the same thing rather than different entities. My aim is to refute and provide an alternative to a currently prominent Platonizing approach to Spinoza’s theory of essences basing itself on a dichotomy of formal and actual essences that I take to be a false dichotomy. I argue in particular that any notion of unactualized formal essences is inconsistent with Spinoza’s commitments on the level of both ontology and modal philosophy.