Perspective

The perspective of the book is that of the narrator, Benedict Spinoza. Spinoza was a 17th century philosopher and one of the so-called rationalists. He believed the there were truths available to pure reason, unaided by experience. Further, he believed that an entire metaphysical system could be built from pure reason. The Ethics begins with a brief argument from the very concept of God to God's existence. Thus, the book is written from a philosopher's perspective, giving arguments that are to tell us the nature of the most foundational aspects of reality. Further, he is specifically biased towards rationalism. This means he believed the intellect is capable of deriving truths about reality from simple conceptual reasoning. We can understand metaphysics and epistemology without direct reference to empirical reality. Instead, a rationalistic metaphysics is required to ground the very validity of experience in the first place. Further, it is...