Abstract

Spinoza’s Ethics is one of the most important works in Western philosophy. Unfortunately, aside from the Vatican manuscript, which is very close to the final printed version, no drafts have been preserved. In this article I shed some new light on the composition of the early draft of Ethics. I argue that there are significant reasons to believe that propositions Ip9 and Ip10 in Spinoza’s Ethics were added to the deductive argument later than the other first propositions: Ip1-Ip8 and Ip11.