Journal of the History of Philosophy

Despite its generic title, Yakira’s Spinoza and the Case for Philosophy has a specific and idiosyncratic focus: Spinoza’s mind-body doctrine, in the context of both an ontology of thought and a search for what Spinoza calls “salvation.” The book will be of value to those interested in Spinoza’s philosophy of mind and epistemology, especially in the context of his moral theory. [End Page 170]

Yakira’s discussion of Spinoza’s mind-body doctrine is thought-provoking, confronting head-on not just well-known puzzles (parallelism, eternity of mind), but also those dark elements of Spinoza’s philosophy of mind that are crucial to his view but rarely discussed. What does it mean to say that the mind is the idea of the body? How does Spinoza understand idea-object relations? Excellent questions indeed.

According to the author, Spinoza steers a historically unique course, free from a Cartesian “subject,” and outside “representational” and “intentional” frameworks (127, 152, 184). The monograph is less interested in a reconstruction of arguments, or in addressing potential objections, than in painting a suggestive panorama of Spinoza’s project. The book belongs to the genre of commentaries that record an author’s experience of reading a work, mulling it over alongside other fertile bits of history of philosophy. The resulting text is, unsurprisingly, full of digressions (and, less illuminatingly, repetitions). It is perhaps the author’s absorption in historical texts that explains the use of gendered language throughout.

The book is spiritedly polemical in its rhetoric, offering gloomy assessments of “modern commentators” (76) and “present day scientific philosophy” (186), though the targets of these criticisms are identified only in vague terms. Philosophers working in the world of Anglophone Spinoza scholarship will be hard-pressed to recognize themselves in the author’s generalizations about contemporary literature. In particular, the author seems to overestimate, without much textual support, both the degree to which there is a consensus about the meaning of parallelism, and the degree to which extant accounts neglect its assertion of ontological unity (though he is right to demand more attention to the intentional aspect of the doctrine). The book’s lack of engagement with the rich recent Anglophone scholarship on its central themes—thought, intelligibility, parallelism, mind-body relations—is puzzling, given that the monograph seems intended for an Anglophone audience. Such engagement would have only enriched the work.

For all the book’s insights, one might quibble with some of its conclusions. One may applaud the author for stressing the importance of the formal-objective reality distinction for Spinoza, but take issue with his reduction of formal reality to extension alone (92, 152–53), given Spinoza’s recognition of “infinite” kinds of being. Not all Spinozistic ideas are of bodies. The author dismisses this element of Spinoza’s picture as “speculative metaphysics with no real bearing on the questions that occupy us here” (151 n. 55). But the bearing is direct: what is at stake is the possibility of identifying, as the author does, the relation formal-objective reality with the relation physical-mental reality—and so of interpreting Spinoza’s claims about the one as claims about the other; and the possibility of claiming that “the real sense of parallelism” reduces to a claim about “body and soul’s oneness” (150), despite its formulation by Spinoza as first of all a doctrine about the relation between “causes” (things) and “ideas” generally.

Another central thesis of Yakira’s is that “Spinoza posits the idea-ideatum unity as primordial,” not “presupposing anything like a thinking subject” (117) or “agent” (119). But the idea-ideatum unity is explicitly described by Spinoza as the product of substance thinking of an existent (Ethics 2p13s). This unity then, rather than being “primordial,” is causally and conceptually dependent on a “res cogitans” engaged in thinking as a certain kind of “action” (2p1, 2def3expl). It is unclear why we should think that “Spinoza’s God is not an agent” (125) or that the notion of...