Spinoza in Twenty-First-Century American and French Philosophy: Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Moral and Political Philosophy by Jack Stetter & Charles Ramond

Author:Jack Stetter & Charles Ramond [Stetter, Jack & Ramond, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Philosophy, History & Surveys, Modern, Metaphysics, Individual Philosophers
ISBN: 9781350067325
Google: 5ll-DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2019-02-07T21:15:31+00:00

Part II

Philosophy of Mind

6

Spinoza’s Two Claims about the Mind-Body Relation

Alison Peterman

Introduction

How is a particular mind related to its body?1 There are many ways to understand this question, and many different answers for those different ways. Spinoza makes a number of claims about this relationship, all of which are independently interesting. But it is not clear that they are compatible. In this chapter, I would like to focus on two of those claims, and to argue that although Spinoza sometimes run these two claims together, in fact he does not succeed in making them compatible with one another. I suggest that the illusion that they are compatible comes from an equivocation between two ways of using the phrase “insofar as” [quatenus], and that this type of equivocation runs deep in Spinoza’s metaphysics.

Those two claims are:

(1) Parallelism: the mind is causally and structurally linked to other minds in the same way that its body is linked to other bodies;

(2) Idea-of: the mind is the idea of its body; or, the body is the object [objectum] of its mind.

In focusing on these two, I will ignore some of those other interesting things that Spinoza writes about the mind-body relationship. For example, I will for the most part ignore his account of it in the earlier Short Treatise, where he claims that love constitutes the union of the mind with the body.2 But I will also ignore another of Spinoza’s commitments that might look more relevant: that the mind and the body are “one and the same thing, understood in two different ways” (E2p7s). There is a lot that is interesting about this claim, but I think it is fair to put it aside in thinking through the relationship between Parallelism and Idea-of.3 Here is a condensed argument for why.

Either Spinoza’s dictum that the mind and the body are “one and the same thing” amounts to the claim that the mind and the body are numerically identical,4 or it does not. If it does not, then we will have to interpret it in light of Spinoza’s other commitments about the mind-body relationship. But then it can’t really be used to understand those commitments. If it does amount to the claim that the mind and the body are numerically identical, then although it delivers to us an interesting ontological fact, that fact does not tell us anything more about the metaphysical, causal or explanatory relationship between the mind and the body. Presumably a very important part of what we want to know when we ask how the mind relates to the body is an understanding of the properties and functions of the mind and the body, and of how the properties and functions of one relate to the properties and functions of the other. But if Spinoza thinks that the mind and body are identical, then he denies the indiscernibility of identicals for many of the properties and functions you might be interested in knowing about. For example, just because a body is in a

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