Genealogy and Function of Time in Spinoza's Ethics

This article aims to describe the process that explains the emergence in Ethics of an imaginative representation of time, and of the contingency that is inherent to it. For this purpose, we will analyze in detail the scolium of EII44, and also its explicit references elsewhere in the text. Our hypothesis is that, despite the absence of an explicit definition of tempus (as there is in other writings of Spinoza), in the posthumous work the reflection about its "nature" and its "function" does not disappear. On the contrary, although it is not explicitly stated, we will maintain that time is an "aid of the imagination" (auxilia imaginationis), which reveals the particularly "ethical" horizon in which the problem of temporality is analyzed in this work.