Michael Della Rocca - Idea Quotes

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Why should the idea of a thing depend … on the idea of the causes of that thing? The answer to this question can be seen as turning on Spinoza's notion of the nature or essence of a thing, and this is so because, for Spinoza, the representation of a thing is intimately connected to that thing's essence.

Michael Della Rocca
Spinoza's thesis of parallelism holds not just for the relations between modes of extension and ideas of them. The parallelism is more general; it is a parallelism of things and ideas.

Michael Della Rocca
For Spinoza, what it is for a body to be my body is simply that my mind represents that body. And, as we have seen, what it is for an idea to represent a body is for the idea to represent the body's place in a causal network, i. e. for the idea to be the explanation of the body in thought. This is another twofold use of the PSR. The mineness of my body must be explained, and it is explained in terms of the notion of representation and ultimately of explanation itself.

Michael Della Rocca
The most fundamental question in the philosophy of mind, for Spinoza, is this: What is it for a thought or idea to represent, to be about, a particular object?

Michael Della Rocca
As always with Spinoza, it is helpful to begin with God. The system of ideas that are parallel to modes of extension constitutes God's infinite intellect.

Michael Della Rocca
For Spinoza, my mind is simply an idea in God's intellect; in particular it is God's idea of my body.

Michael Della Rocca
Spinoza's naturalism and rationalism are nowhere more evident and more relevant to contemporary philosophy than in his philosophy of mind. All there is to thought is the having of ideas, representations of certain things. Thus, in laying down requirements on what it is to have an idea or representation of an object, Spinoza is articulating the essence of the mental.

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