Michael Della Rocca - Human Quotes

2 Sourced Quotes

View all Michael Della Rocca Quotes

Spinoza's own view is one according to which human beings and the rest of reality are not explained in such different ways, according to which human beings and all else operate according to the same laws. Such a unification of explanatory principles is the heart of Spinoza's naturalism about psychology: human psychology is governed by the same fundamental principles that govern rocks and tables and dogs. Thus no new principles are needed to explain human psychology beyond those principles needed to explain the rest of nature anyway. More generally, Spinoza's naturalism, as I understand it, is the view that there are no illegitimate bifurcations in reality.

Michael Della Rocca

For Spinoza, obviously, the human mind, as well as the human body, are individuals (actually, they are the same individual). However, this individuality of the human mind would be threatened if the human mind were made up of ideas whose contents were relatively disparate, if these ideas were not all focused around a particular unified thing, such as the human body.

Michael Della Rocca