3 he Earliest Drat of Spinoza’s Ethics Yitzhak Y. Melamed Introduction The two manuscripts of the Short Treatise discovered in the mid-nineteenth century contain two appendices. 1 These appendices are even more enigmatic than the Short Treatise itself, and the first appendix is the subject of this study. Unfortunately, there are very few studies of this text, and its precise nature seems to be still in question after more than a century and a half of scholarship. 2 It is commonly assumed that the appendices were written after the body of the Short Treatise, and I am not going to challenge this assumption. 3 The first appendix is written in a geometric manner, and it contains seven axioms and four propositions. Strikingly, it does not include any definitions. This is in sharp contrast with Spinoza’s Ethics and his 1663 book, Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, which are similarly written in a geometric manner but include both definitions and axioms. One could perhaps suspect that the text we currently have is merely a fragment from a more extensive work that included definitions. In my chapter, I will show that this is not the case, and that the first appendix belongs to a genuine work of Spinoza that never contained definitions. I would further argue that the first appendix is most probably the earliest draft we currently have of Spinoza’s magnum opus, the Ethics, but we have a long way to go before we reach that conclusion. 4 Generally, the content of the first appendix (henceforth KV-A1) is close to two other texts: the second chapter of the first part of the Short Treatise, entitled “What God Is,” and the first eight to ten propositions of Ethics Part 1. A major theme of this piece is the problem of individuation. On this issue, as well as a few others, it sheds new light and helps explain some long-standing problems in the argumentation of the Ethics. Let me also note that in one of the two manuscripts the first appendix is introduced by the title “On God,” which is the title of Ethics 9781350067301_txt_rev.indd 93 14-09-2018 20:12:34