 What is sometimes overlooked in discussions of common notions is that Spinoza allows for two kinds of common notions: what we could call 1) universal common notions, notions of truly universally instantiated non-scalar properties, such as extension; and 2) relative common notions, ideas of properties “common to, and peculiar to [proprium], the human body and certain external bodies by which the human Body is usually affected [affici solet], and is equally in the part and in the whole of each of them” (E2p39). It’s not obvious what to make of this characterization of the second type of common notion. What counts as being “peculiar” to what “usually” affects us? For example, are the general ideas Spinoza relies on in his account of the human mind and human emotions (“affects”) common notions in this more circumscribed sense? We could pose the same question of universal common notions: what should we include in that list, beyond the fairly uncontroversial examples of extension, thought, motion-and-rest?