Abstract

The nature of Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge still remains a matter of discussion as it has not been clarified yet. This paper offers a comparison between this knowledge in Spinoza and the superior knowledge to the rational discursive knowledge that Ibn Ṭufayl puts forward in his work translated in 1671 with the title Philosophus autodidactus, a work that Spinoza knew and recommended to his friends. Since this type of knowledge in Ibn Ṭufayl is a kind of rationalization of the mystic experience, and given that Spinoza highly esteemed this work by Ibn Ṭufayl, we could infer from these two hints how the nature of Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge should be understood.