John Brandau

This chapter concentrates on Spinoza’s enigmatic claim in the Korte Verhandling (KV) that entities can have varying _degrees of essence_. This puzzling claim can create the impression that Spinoza quantified essence as mass term rather than a count term, and that entities are distinguished not by possessing distinct essences so much as by possessing distinct quantities of a homogenous “stuff,” essence. This chapter provides an alternative explanation of what Spinoza might have meant by claiming that entities may have varying degrees of essence. It argues that Spinoza identified a thing’s essence with its perfection, and that, generally speaking, an entity may have more or less essence in proportion to the quantity of its essential properties.