Spinoza: Ideas

This guide has an introduction and five chapters, one for each of the parts of Spinoza's Ethics. The Introduction includes background material necessary for productive study of the Ethics: advice for working with Spinoza's geometrical method, a biographical sketch of Spinoza, and accounts of important predecessors: Aristotle, Maimonides, and Descartes. The chapters that follow trace the Ethics in detail, including accounts of most of the elements in Spinoza's book and raising questions for further research. Chapter 1, "One Infinite Substance," covers (...) central arguments of Spinoza's substance monism. Chapter 2, "The Idea of the Human Body," follows Spinoza's detailed metaphysics of ordinary objects, his theory of mind, and his epistemology. Chapter 3, "Desire, Joy, and Sadness," works from Spinoza's broad theory of finite activity in the striving to persevere in being to his detailed accounts of human action and passion. Chapter 4, "Bondage to Passion," emphasizes Spinoza's formal theory of value, his intellectualism in ethics, and particular claims about value that follow from these commitments. Chapter 5, "The Power of the Intellect," begins with Spinoza's criticism of Descartes's account of our ability to control passion and moves to Spinoza's own theory, which emphasizes reason, the eternal part of the mind, and human blessedness. (shrink)

Do minds and ideas connect, interact, or even depend on each other, and if so, how exactly do they connect and interact? How should we conceive of the mode and process of minds and ideas being in a network and connected in some way, that is, being intersubjective or social? Martin Lenz's study Socializing Minds convincingly shows that, contrary to widespread opinion in philosophy of mind, at least some early modern philosophers, here Spinoza, Locke, and Hume, actually give a positive (...) answer to the first question and present models that respond to the second question, thus addressing what Lenz proposes calling 'the contact problem' and repudiating the idea that mentalism is necessarily bound to individualism. In this comment, I focus on a detail in Lenz's reconstruction of Spinoza's 'metaphysical model' of the intersubjectivity of minds, namely the Aristotelian physical dynamism that would underlie Spinoza's idea of the interaction of minds. While I agree that Spinoza's model of interaction of minds refers to the Aristotelian conception of motion, I argue that the guiding principle in natural motion is best understood not only in terms of contrariety but also in terms of complementarity. Admittedly, my proposal goes beyond Spinoza's model of ideas in contact, and probably beyond Lenz's interpretation of that model, but it might enrich the imagination of the socialising of minds and ideas from a kinetic point of view, which, at least as I understand it, is precisely what Spinoza and Lenz thrive on. (shrink)

The monograph offers an original account of Spinoza’s philosophy and ethics concentrated on its concordance with selected modern neuroscientific theories. The book proceeds through the whole of Spinoza’s philosophy and by increasingly complex analytical account acquaints with its essential frameworks, terminology, and concepts, and is thus accessible also to readers who are not yet familiar with the thought of this peculiar thinker. The fundamental motives of this interpretation are the nature of the mind and the questions of human freedom and (...) human bondage, mainly in connection with the investigation of affects (passions and drives) that the mind tends to be bound with. In his philosophy, Spinoza not only offers brilliant analyses of human experience but in anticipation of modern psychotherapeutic techniques suggests practical methods for the realization of sufficiently functional affective-cognitive self-therapy aimed at the regulation and control of one’s passivity. The understanding of and working with one’s weaknesses is, according to Spinoza, the necessary condition for realizing one’s freedom, or – for being able to shift from pathetics to ethics. (shrink)

Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind presents cutting-edge work in the philosophy of mind, combining invited articles and articles selected from submissions. Each volume will highlight two themes to bring focus to debates. The series will reflect the diversity of methods adopted in contemporary philosophy of mind and provide a venue for rigorous and innovative work by both established and up-and-coming voices in the field. The themes covered in the second volume are doxastic states, the metaphysics of mind, and Spinoza's (...) role in the history of philosophy of mind. (shrink)

I propose a new interpretation of Spinoza’s obscure but important concept of ‘expression’. Any account of Spinozistic expression must be able to fulfil two principal requirements. First, it must be...

The notion of divine love was essential to medieval Christian conceptions of God. Jewish thinkers, though, had a much more ambivalent attitude about this issue. While Maimonides was reluctant to ascribe love, or any other affect, to God, Gersonides and Crescas celebrated God’s love. Though Spinoza is clearly sympathetic to Maimonides’ rejection of divine love as anthropomorphism, he attributes love to God nevertheless, unfolding his notion of amor Dei intellectualis at the conclusion of his Ethics. But is this a legitimate (...) notion within his system? In the first part of this article, I will explain some of the problems surrounding this notion, and then turn, in the second part, to consider two unsatisfactory solutions. In the third part, I will attempt to rework Spinoza’s amor Dei intellectualis from his definitions of love and the other affects in part three of the Ethics. In the fourth part, I will examine closely how Spinoza tweaks his definition of love in order to allow for the possibility of divine intellectual love, and conclude by trying to explain what motivated this move. (shrink)

Spinoza's guiding commitment to the thesis that nothing exists or occurs outside of the scope of nature and its necessary laws makes him one of the great seventeenth-century exemplars of both philosophical naturalism and explanatory rationalism. Nature and Necessity in Spinoza's Philosophy brings together for the first time eighteen of Don Garrett's articles on Spinoza's philosophy, ranging over the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics, and political philosophy. Taken together, these influential articles provide a comprehensive interpretation of that (...) philosophy, including Spinoza's theories of substance, thought and extension, causation, truth, knowledge, individuation, representation, consciousness, conatus, teleology, emotion, freedom, responsibility, virtue, contract, the state, and eternity-and the deep interrelations among them. Each article aims to resolve significant problems in the understanding of Spinoza's philosophy in such a way as to make evident both his reasons for his views and the enduring value of his ideas. At the same time, Garrett's articles elucidate the relations between his philosophy and those of predecessors and contemporaries like Aristotle, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz. Lastly, the volume offers important and substantial replies to leading critics on four crucial topics: the necessary existence of God (Nature), substance monism, necessitarianism, and consciousness. (shrink)

The aim of this article is twofold: to provide a valid account of Spinoza’s theory of fictitious ideas, and to demonstrate its coherency with the overall modal metaphysics underpinning his philosophical system. According to Leibniz, the existence of romances and novels would be sufficient to demonstrate, against Spinoza’s necessitarianism, that possible entities exist and are intelligible, and that many other worlds different from ours could have existed in its place. I argue that Spinoza does not actually need to resort to (...) the notion of possible entities in order to explain the incontrovertible existence of fictions and fictitious ideas. In order to demonstrate this, I first show how, according to Spinoza, true ideas of nonexistent things need not be regarded as fictitious ideas. Then, I will show by which means Spinoza can justify the real existence of fictions and fictitious ideas in the human mind through our present knowledge of actually existing things, to conclude that fictitious ideas neither add anything to what we already know of things, nor do they increase the extent of the existing conceivable reality by demanding the existence of possible non-actualised entities. (shrink)

In this paper I argue, based on a comparison of Spinoza's and Descartes‟s discussion of error, that beliefs are affirmations of the content of imagination that is not false in itself, only in relation to the object. This interpretation is an improvement both on the winning ideas reading and on the interpretation reading of beliefs. Contrary to the winning ideas reading it is able to explain belief revision concerning the same representation. Also, it does not need the assumption that I (...) misinterpret my otherwise correct ideas as the interpretation reading would have it. In the first section I will provide a brief overview of the notion of inherence and its role in Spinoza‟s discussion of the status of finite minds. Then by examining the relation between Spinoza‟s and Descartes‟ distinction of representations and attitudes, I show that affirmation can be identified with beliefs in Spinoza. Next, I will take a closer look at the identification of intellect and will and argue that Spinoza's identification of the two is based on the fact that Spinoza sees both as the active aspect of the mind. After that, I analyze Spinoza‟s comments on the different scopes of will and intellect, and argue that beliefs are affirmations of the imaginative content of the idea. Finally, through Spinoza‟s example of the utterance of mathematical error, I present my solution to the problem of inherence of false beliefs. (shrink)

This article explores a new reading of an important section of Part II of Spinoza’s Ethics. It recognizes that Spinoza actually differentiates between the human mind conceived from the viewpoint of its cause and the human mind conceived from the viewpoint of its nature. It shows, most importantly, that Spinoza assigns different objects to those ‘minds’. Consequently they represent different knowledge of the body. It will appear that the human mind in respect of its cause represents non-conscious knowledge of the (...) human body and that the human mind in respect of its nature represents conscious knowledge of the human body. It will be shown that knowledge of the inner processes of the human body and of the body per se belongs to the domain of non-conscious knowledge. The same conclusion will be obtained in an analysis that starts from the distinction between the formal and the objective being of the human mind. (shrink)

Spinoza unequivocally states in the Ethics that intuitive knowledge is more powerful than reason. Nonetheless, it is not clear what exactly this greater power promises in the face of the passions. Does this mean that intuitive knowledge is not liable to akrasia? Ronald Sandler offers what, to my knowledge, is the only explicit answer to this question in recent Spinoza scholarship. According to Sandler, intuitive knowledge, unlike reason, is not susceptible to akrasia. This is because, intuitive knowledge enables the knower (...) to greater power over the passions due to its immediacy, its foundation and because it engenders the boundlessly powerful intellectual love of God. In this paper, I consider to what extent intuitive knowledge is liable to akrasia by exploring whether Sandler's claim can justifiably be attributed to Spinoza. I argue that, given our modal status, it is not plausible to claim that akrasia would never apply to intuitive knowledge. Since intuitive ideas are the ideas of a finite .. (shrink)

Eugene Marshall presents an original, systematic account of Spinoza's philosophy of mind, in which the mind is presented as an affective mechanism that, when rational, behaves as a spiritual automaton. He explores key themes in Spinoza's thought, and illuminates his philosophical and ethical project in a striking new way.

Yitzhak Melamed here offers a new and systematic interpretation of the core of Spinoza's metaphysics. In the first part of the book, he proposes a new reading of the metaphysics of substance in Spinoza: he argues that for Spinoza modes both inhere in and are predicated of God. Using extensive textual evidence, he shows that Spinoza considered modes to be God's propria. He goes on to clarify Spinoza's understanding of infinity, mereological relations, infinite modes, and the flow of finite things (...) from God's essence. In the second part of the book, Melamed relies on this interpretation of the substance-mode relation and the nature of infinite modes and puts forward two interrelated theses about the structure of the attribute of Thought and its overarching role in Spinoza's metaphysics. First, he shows that Spinoza had not one, but two independent doctrines of parallelism. Then, in his final main thesis, Melamed argues that, for Spinoza, ideas have a multifaceted structure that allows one and the same idea to represent the infinitely many modes which are parallel to it in the infinitely many attributes. Thought turns out to be coextensive with the whole of nature. Spinoza cannot embrace an idealist reduction of Extension to Thought because of his commitment to the conceptual separation of the attributes. Yet, within Spinoza's metaphysics, Thought clearly has primacy over the other attributes insofar as it is the only attribute which is as elaborate, as complex, and, in some senses, as powerful as God. (shrink)

This paper outlines the role of the bodily essence in Spinoza’s epistemology. Spinoza maintains in the Ethics that the power of the imagination depends on bodily affections and it explains the inadequateness of imaginative ideas. However, Spinoza also exploits the capabilities of the human body to work out his account of common notions, which grounds the adequate knowledge provided by reason. Moreover, the essentia corporis plays a crucial role in the fifth part of the Ethics. Indeed, the “eternal part” of (...) the mind depends on the adequate idea of the eternal essence of the human body. By connecting this idea with other ideas, the mind has the power of ordering its ideas according to the intellect. Thus, the mind increases the number of the ideas it conceives of sub specie aeternitatis. In this sense, the bodily essence is not only the ground of Spinoza’s epistemology but also of Spinoza’s doctrine of the eternity of the mind. (shrink)

While both intuitive knowledge and reason are adequate ways of knowing for Spinoza, they are not equal. Intuitive knowledge, which Spinoza describes as the ‘greatest virtue of mind’, is superior to reason. The nature of this superiority has been the subject of some controversy due to Spinoza's notoriously parsimonious treatment of the distinction between reason and intuitive knowledge in the Ethics. In this paper, I argue that intuitive knowledge differs from reason not only in terms of its method of cognition—but (...) also in terms of its content. More specifically, I maintain that there is something that is known by intuition, namely the unique essences of things, that is not known by reason. My argument is supported by an examination of Spinoza's account of essences in the Ethics, which reveals that he is committed to both unique and shared essences. Based on this dual commitment, I argue that whereas for Spinoza both reason and intuition can be said to reach adequate knowledge of the shared essence of a thing, the unique essence of a singular thing, which is nothing but its actual essence, can only be known through intuitive knowledge. (shrink)

What surfaces first when one examines the philosophy of mind of Sartre and Spinoza are the differences between them. For Spinoza a human mind is a mode of the divine mind. That view is a far cry from Sartre’s view of human consciousness as a desire never achieved: the desire to be god, to be the foundation of one’s own existence. How could two philosophers, one a determinist and the other who grounds human freedom in the nature of consciousness itself, (...) be seen as having any commonalities worth exploring? How could the noted user of the deductive method and one of the most important phenomenologists of the twentieth century share any philosophical ground at all? I will argue in this paper that despite the very real differences between their two philosophies, there are striking similarities between Sartre’s view of consciousness and Spinoza’s view of the mind. They become apparent when one examines each one’s analysis of the nature of mind and its relationship to itself, the body, and the world. Both are heir to a kind of Aristotelian naturalism. This commonality between them derives from their mutual rejection of Descartes’ substance dualism. I first explore the consequences of that rejection on how each one conceives of the relationship between the mind and its objects. Next I examine their view of the mind’s relation to itself and finally I look at how each one understood the mind’s relationship to the body and the world. The examination of their two views reveals how much they anticipate and support theories of mind defended by contemporary analytic philosophers of mind. (shrink)

Spinoza claims we can control any passion by forming a more clear and distinct idea of it. The interpretive consensus is that Spinoza is either wrong or over-stating his view. I argue that Spinoza’s view is plausible and insightful. After breaking down Spinoza’s characterization of the relevant act, I consider four existing interpretations and conclude that each is unsatisfactory. I then consider a further problem for Spinoza: how his definitions of ‘action’ and ‘passion’ make room for passions becoming action. I (...) propose two solutions to this problem, both of which yield a hint regarding what act Spinoza has in mind. Using that hint, I propose that we can appreciate Spinoza’s insight by considering how philosophizing about a feeling can 'kill the mood.' The act of grasping how a passion exemplifies certain general truths, I hold, is a distinctly rational activity that has all the features Spinoza describes. I conclude by showing how this interpretation fits with Spinoza’s larger views on rational knowledge, rational joy, the comprehensibility of passions, and the relation between second- and first-order ideas. (shrink)

In this paper, I suggest an outline of a new interpretation of core issues in Spinoza’s metaphysics and philosophy of mind. I argue for three major theses. (1) In the first part of the paper I show that the celebrated Spinozistic doctrine commonly termed “the doctrine of parallelism” is in fact a confusion of two separate and independent doctrines of parallelism. Hence, I argue that our current understanding of Spinoza’s metaphysics and philosophy of mind is fundamentally flawed. (2) The clarification (...) and setting apart of the two doctrines will also put us in a position to present my second major thesis and address one of the more interesting and enduring problems in Spinoza’s metaphysics: how can the attribute of thought be, on the one hand, isomorphic with any other attribute, and yet, on the other hand, be isomorphic with God himself, who has infinitely many attributes? In the second part of the paper, I present Spinoza’s solution to this problem. I argue that the number and order of modes is the same in all attributes. Yet, modes of Thought, unlike modes of any other attribute, have an infinitely-faceted internal structure so that one and the same idea represents infinitely many modes by having infinitely many facets (or aspects). (3) This new understanding of the inner structure of ideas in Spinoza will lead us to my third thesis in which I explain and solve another old riddle in Spinoza’s metaphysics: his insistence on the impossibility of the human mind knowing any of God’s infinite attributes other than Thought and Extension. In the third part, I show some of the major ramifications of my new interpretation and respond to some important objections. In my conclusion I discuss the philosophical importance of my interpretation. I explain why Spinoza could not embrace reductive idealism in spite of the preeminence he grants to the attribute of Thought. I argue that Spinoza is a dualist -- not a mind-body dualist, as he is commonly conceived to be, but rather a dualist of Thought and Being. Finally, I suggest that Spinoza’s position on the mind-body issue breaks with the traditional categories and ways of addressing the subject by suggesting a view which grants clear primacy to Thought without accepting any idealist reduction of bodies to thought. (shrink)

According to Spinoza, what is the relationship between the mental – ideas, minds, and the attribute of Thought – and the conceptual – concepts, conceiving, and conceptual dependence? The natural and pervasive interpretive assumption that Spinoza’s appeals to the conceptual are synonymous with appeals to the mental ought to be rejected, a rejection that prevents some of his central metaphysical doctrines from otherwise collapsing into incoherence. A close reading of key texts shows instead that conceptual relations are attribute-neutral for Spinoza; (...) mental relations comprise a proper subset of conceptual relations. This surprising conclusion, that the conceptual outstrips the mental, also sheds new light the relationship between the attributes, the extent of parallelism, and the nature of extension. It also shows how Spinoza’s frequent privileging of the conceptual avoids collapsing into a kind of idealism, a central point on which the most novel recent interpretation of Spinoza (Michael Della Rocca’s) falters. (shrink)

This paper aims to discuss Spinoza’s theory of consciousness by arguing that consciousness is the expression of bodily complexity in terms of adequate knowledge. Firstly, I present the link that Spinoza built up in the second part of the Ethics between the ability of the mind to know itself and the idea ideae theory. Secondly, I present in what sense consciousness turns out to be the result of an adequate knowledge emerging from the epistemological resources of a body as complex (...) as the human one. Thirdly, I address a possible objection that might arise in considering our daily-life experience of consciousness. I conclude that understanding consciousness in terms of adequate knowledge is coherent with both our phenomenological experience and Spinoza’s texts. Such an interpretation permits to underline the overthrow of Descartes’ account of consciousness by Spinoza. (shrink)

Spinoza's philosophy of mind is thought to lack a serious account of consciousness. In this essay I argue that Spinoza's doctrine of ideas of ideas has been wrongly construed, and that once righted it provides the foundation for an account. I then draw out the finer details of Spinoza's account of consciousness, doing my best to defend its plausibility along the way. My view is in response to a proposal by Edwin Curley and the serious objection leveled against it by (...) Margaret Wilson and Jonathan Bennett. (shrink)

Spinoza’s project of showing how the mind can be freed from its passive affects and the State from its divisive factions ultimately coincides with the aims announced in the subtitle of the Tractatus-Theologico-Politicus “to demonstrate that [the] freedom to philosophize does not endanger the piety and obedience required for civic peace.”1 Both projects rest on a set of provisional isomorphic distinctions—between adequate and inadequate ideas, between reason and the imagination, between active and passive affects—that Spinoza proceeds to blur, and indeed (...) to renounce. In using these distinctions while also moving to overcome them, Spinoza is not confused or indecisive. Every philosopher, every wise Sovereign, every free man who attempts to incorporate adequate ideas in inadequately framed, perspectivally limited contexts must use these distinctions and also see how deeply misleading they are. I want to offer a friendly amendment to Hasana Sharpe’s essay “The Force of Ideas in Spinoza” arguing that Spinoza refuses her distinction between the force of an idea and its truth.2. (shrink)

Spinoza rejects fundamental tenets of received morality, including the notions of Providence and free will. Yet he retains rich theories of good and evil, virtue, perfection, and freedom. Building interconnected readings of Spinoza's accounts of imagination, error, and desire, Michael LeBuffe defends a comprehensive interpretation of Spinoza's enlightened vision of human excellence. Spinoza holds that what is fundamental to human morality is the fact that we find things to be good or evil, not what we take those designations to mean. (...) When we come to understand the conditions under which we act-that is, when we come to understand the sorts of beings that we are and the ways in which we interact with things in the world-then we can recast traditional moral notions in ways that help us to attain more of what we find to be valuable.For Spinoza, we find value in greater activity. Two hazards impede the search for value. First, we need to know and acquire the means to be good. In this respect, Spinoza's theory is a great deal like Hobbes's: we strive to be active, and in order to do so we need food, security, health, and other necessary components of a decent life. There is another hazard, however, that is more subtle. On Spinoza's theory of the passions, we can misjudge our own natures and fail to understand the sorts of beings that we really are. So we can misjudge what is good and might even seek ends that are evil. Spinoza's account of human nature is thus much deeper and darker than Hobbes's: we are not well known to ourselves, and the self-knowledge that is the foundation of virtue and freedom is elusive and fragile. (shrink)

Spinoza presents the “dictates of reason” as the foundation of “the right way of living”. An influential reading of his position assimilates it to that of Hobbes. The dictates of reason are normative principles that prescribe necessary means to a necessary end: self-preservation. Against this reading I argue that, for Spinoza, the term “dictates of reason” does not refer to a set of prescriptive principles but simply the necessary consequences, or effects, of the mind's determination by adequate ideas. I draw (...) on this conclusion in highlighting an abiding tension in Spinoza's notion of the preservation of one's being, which reinforces his divergence from Hobbes. (shrink)