Spinoza: Philosophy of Mind, Misc

This thesis focuses on the ontological status of the mind according to various interpretative traditions of Spinoza scholarship and Indo-Tibetan Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy. It compares two texts: Ethics by Spinoza and The Way of the Bodhisattva by Śāntideva. I argue against the materialist interpretation of Spinoza on the basis that it reduces his concept of monism to extension and mistakenly frames Spinoza’s insights in terms of Cartesian rationality. I then explain Śāntideva’s non-dual concept of mind as the middle between the (...) extremes of nihilism and essentialism, and compare these to the materialist interpretation of Spinoza’s concept of mind as non-existent, and the non-materialist view that the essence of the mind is basic self-assertion. I conclude that for Spinoza the mind exists, whereas for Śāntideva the mind is beyond concepts of existence and non-existence. Chapter 1: Spinoza’s concept of mind The concept of monism describes reality as one substance with infinite attributes, which human beings encounter as thought or extension, through the modes of individual minds and bodies respectively. For strict materialists, only extended modes actually exist and the concept of the mind is correlated with changes in the body, such as neural activity, or with the conceivability of the order of nature. I argue that despite rejecting Descartes’ concept of mental substance, materialists have transferred the dualism between intellect and feeling to their interpretation of Spinoza’s concept of mind. The non-materialist interpretation of Spinoza such as that of Deleuze, attends to the distinction between essence and existence, and describes the mind as inherently existing to the extent that it participates in substance. For panpsychists, singular minds exist as subjects striving for existence while immersed in the influences of nature. Chapter two: The Mahāyāna Buddhist Concept of Mind Śāntideva refutes the views of earlier Buddhist and non-Buddhist schools in the famous Wisdom chapter of The Way of the Bodhisattva. Śāntideva argues that the mind is beyond the concepts of existence and non-existence using Nāgārjuna’s view of relative and ultimate truth and Dharmakīrti’s logic of valid cognition. The view of selflessness describes the mind as empty: it appears relatively, but ultimately it does not exist as an independent, permanent thing. It is an ephemeral gathering together of the five aggregates, which describe the interconnectedness of thoughts, feelings and dispositions of the mind and body. Chapter three: A comparison of the monist and non-dualist concepts of mind In this chapter I compare Spinoza’s monism and Śāntideva’s non-dualism and I argue that for Spinoza, the mind exists as “basic self-assertion” whereas Śāntideva presents the view of “selflessness”, which is distinct from a view of nihilism. I recognise that although the cultural and historical contexts are very different there are striking similarities in the structure of Spinoza’s and Śāntideva’s theories, including the relationship between the mind and body, thoughts and feelings, and the interconnectedness with nature. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWe seem to have a direct experience of our freedom when we act. Many philosophers take this feeling of freedom as evidence that we possess libertarian free will. Spinoza denies that we have free will of any sort, although he admits that we nonetheless feel free. Commentators often attribute to him what I call the ‘Negative Account’ of the feeling: it results from the fact that we are conscious of our actions but ignorant of their causes. I argue that the (...) Negative Account is flawed. The feeling of freedom also depends on a vacillation of the mind. When the mind forms too many incompatible associations, it vacillates between them. When we act, the mind vacillates back and forth between the kinds of actions that we associate with our present mental state. We then mistake this subjective vacillation for an objective feature of ourselves—namely, the power to do otherwise. (shrink)

The article explores the idea that according to Spinoza finite thought and substantial thought represent reality in different ways. It challenges “acosmic” readings of Spinoza's metaphysics, put forth by readers like Hegel, according to which only an infinite, undifferentiated substance genuinely exists, and all representations of finite things are illusory. Such representations essentially involve negation with respect to a more general kind. The article shows that several common responses to the charge of acosmism fail. It then argues that we must (...) distinguish the well-founded ideality of representations of finite things from mere illusoriness, insofar as for Spinoza we can have true knowledge of what is known only abstractly. Finite things can be seen as well-founded beings of reason. The article also proposes that within Spinoza's framework it is possible to represent a finite thing without drawing on representations of mind-dependent entities. (shrink)

The article includes the French to English translation of a seminal article by Alexandre Koyré (“Le chien, constellation céleste, et le chien animal aboyant”, in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 55e Année, N° 1, Jan-Mar 1950, pp. 50-59), accompanied by an explanatory introduction. Koyré's French text provides an illuminating commentary of E1p17s, where Spinoza exposes at length his account of the relationship existing between God's intellect and the human intellect. The lack of an English translation of this article has (...) led to some misunderstanding within the English-speaking Spinoza scholarship. This publication aims to correct this lack and improve worldwide understanding of Spinoza’s philosophy. (shrink)

The concept of 'social brain‘ is a hybrid, located somewhere in between politically motivated philosophical speculation about the mind and its place in the social world, and recently emerged inquiries into cognition, selfhood, development, etc., returning to some of the founding insights of social psychology but embedding them in a neuroscientific framework. In this paper I try to reconstruct a philosophical tradition for the social brain, a ‗Spinozist‘ tradition which locates the brain within the broader network of relations, including social (...) relations. This tradition runs from Spinoza to Lev Vygotsky in the early 20th century, and on to Gilles Deleuze, Toni Negri and Paolo Virno in recent European philosophy, as a new perspective on the brain. The concept of social brain that is articulated in this reconstruction – some early-20th century Soviet neuropsychologists spoke of socialism and the cortex as being ―on the same path‖ – overcomes distinctions between Continental thought and the philosophy of mind, and possibly gives a new metaphysical framework for social cognition. (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)