Abstract

In this dissertation, I trace the development of Spinoza's philosophy of mind throughout his corpus. I argue that understanding the development of his thought, as well as its historical context, helps us understand how Spinoza's mature system fits together. Owing to the complexity and systematic nature of Spinoza's philosophy, along with the tendency in the literature to study his Ethics in isolation, the importance of such connections for the proper understanding of any particular area of his thought is often overlooked. This project focuses on the connections between Spinoza's philosophy of mind and political philosophy. The goal of my dissertation is to show how, not just that, these two aspects of his system are related. For example, I show how Spinoza's parallelism principle, a development that does not occur until Part II of the Ethics, allows Spinoza to account for the individuation and identity of minds and bodies. This account is foundational for both his mature theory of mind and for his systematization of the doctrines of a political movement in The Netherlands known as "Radical Cartesianism". I see the development of the parallelism principle as a turning point in Spinoza's philosophy and a solution that Spinoza was working towards throughout his philosophical career. ;My methodology is twofold: first, a reconstruction of the development of key epistemological doctrines in Spinoza's corpus; second an examination of the intellectual context of that development. The key doctrines I examine to trace the changes in Spinoza's philosophy of mind are his views on truth, error, and falsity. I begin with the Appendix Containing Metaphysical Thoughts. I argue that this work represents Spinoza's earliest thinking about the mind. Then, through textual comparison, I reconstruct Spinoza's development through his transitional works, the Emendation of the Intellect and Short Treatise, and his mature work, the Ethics. I show how these developments are related to Spinoza's commitments to Radical Cartesian political theory. ;I conclude that while Spinoza is greatly influenced by Descartes, he never accepted Descartes' theory of mind; as Spinoza's theory of mind develops, it looks less and less similar to that of Descartes'; and the development of Spinoza's theory of mind is largely motivated by his commitments to Radical Cartesian Politics. Ironically, Spinoza's attempt to make coherent a political movement based on Descartes' psychology and overall philosophical methodology ends in a rejection of that very psychology and major components of that methodology