Michael Della Rocca - Mind Quotes

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Spinoza's parallelism embodies in many ways a deeply anti-Cartesian view. By keeping the causal chains of modes of extension somehow separate from the causal chains of modes of thought, Spinoza is guided by his overarching denial of any explanatory connections between the mental and the physical, i. e. of connections of the kind that Descartes, in his account of mind-body interaction, quite happily embraces. But precisely because Spinoza separates the causal chains in this way, there might be thought to be a crucial point of agreement between Descartes and Spinoza on the nature of mind-body relations.

Michael Della Rocca
Spinoza's commitment to intelligibility is extremely ambitious in at least two respects. First, he insists that each thing is intelligible, there are no facts impervious to explanation. Second, he holds that these explanations are—in principle—graspable by us. Our minds are, of course, limited in some ways; there are limits to how many things we can fully grasp.

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
Unsurprisingly, then, Spinoza has not solved the mind-body problem. But he has advanced our understanding of it. He has shown how, if one skillfully and consistently wields the PSR and the conceptual barrier between thought and extension, one can construct an argument for the view that there is one substance and one can undermine the Cartesian intuitions that material things and physical things cannot be identical.

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
Spinoza's philosophy of mind is, in many ways, the richest and most challenging part of his metaphysical system. Here, perhaps, more than anywhere else, Spinoza is ahead of his time.

Michael Della Rocca