akighir caleb

The problem of knowledge dominated the very beginnings of critical thought right through the era of ancient philosophy to contemporary times. The skeptics built on the inconsistencies in the responses of the cosmological philosophers as to the basic stuff from which all things found existence to deduce the conclusion that no knowledge was attainable or possible. The project of disproving this skeptical claim led to the development of epistemology through the schools of rationalism and empiricism. Of the rationalists was the 17th century Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, who developed a hierarchy of knowledge moving from opinion to truth. He believed that rising above imagination, through to the active participation in the eternal attributes from which all reality shares their being, absolute knowledge could be attained. Employing the expository and analytic research methodologies, this work seeks to carry out an analysis of Spinoza’s epistemological conclusions and its import in the rationalist debate. This work shows how according to Spinoza, absolute knowledge can be attained.