Michael Della Rocca - Spinoza Quotes

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Spinoza thus sees his philosophy as a stronghold against irrationalism in philosophy and as a challenge to other more complacent ways of doing philosophy. For these reasons—in other words, because of the purity of his philosophy—Spinoza enjoys a permanent and essential place in the canon of great philosophers and provides a refreshing and needed contrast to other, less ambitious philosophical approaches.

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
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 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
The final major difference between Spinoza's ontology and Descartes's ontology that I want to focus on is Spinoza's denial of Descartes's view that a substance can have only one attribute. For Spinoza, a substance can have more than one attribute; indeed, for him, the one substance, God, has infinitely many different attributes. How can this be so in light of the Cartesian reasons for limiting each substance to one attribute?

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
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
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
According to Spinoza's system, all reality flows with strict necessity from the nature of God. With the geometrical method, Spinoza captures the structure of this reality by deducing philosophical conclusions about reality from definitions which express the nature of God.

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
Spinoza's life reflects his commitment to intelligibility.

Michael Della Rocca
His lifelong motto was caute—carefully. Spinoza knew that others would find his naturalism and rationalism dangerous, and although he published some work during his lifetime, he withheld from the public the most radical statement of his naturalistic and rationalistic vision. Spinoza's life, thus, was in many ways marked by a balance between, on the one hand, extreme caution and the dread of public controversy and, on the other, an audacious hope and need that others would come to share in his striking naturalistic conception.

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
Spinoza's relentless rational scrutiny extends far and deep.

Michael Della Rocca
Rethinking Spinoza in light of the Principle of Sufficient Reason promises to be important not only for our understanding of Spinoza, but also for our understanding of the philosophical issues Spinoza deals with and that continue to trouble philosophers today.

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
I think that one who appreciates the fact that, if there are to be genuine causal connections, they must amount to conceptual connections, is Hume. Hume, of course, denies that there are conceptual connections among distinct things and so he is unable to come up with genuine cases of causation. But, in a way, Hume does accept the rationalist demand that, if there is to be genuine causation, it must amount to conceptual connection. Spinoza accepts this rationalist demand too. But, unlike Hume, he sees there as being genuine conceptual connections, i. e. causal connections, in the world.

Michael Della Rocca
Spinoza thinks that God must be understood in terms of contentful, explanatorily basic features. This is in keeping with his rationalist commitment to the intelligibility of all things, including God.

Michael Della Rocca
Spinoza can be seen as a pure philosopher, always seeking explanation, always refusing to be satisfied with primitive, inexplicable notions. This purity is most evident in his commitment to the principle that each fact has an explanation, that for each thing that exists there is an explanation that suffices for one to see why that thing exists. Although Spinoza does not himself use the term, this principle is known as the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR).

Michael Della Rocca
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 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
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
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
The purity of Spinoza's commitment to explanation can best be articulated in terms of his commitments to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (hereafter, the PSR) and to his naturalism.

Michael Della Rocca
How many things are there in the world? Spinoza's answer: one.

Michael Della Rocca