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The Mind's Body: The Body's Self-Awareness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2010
Extract
In order to find out how successful or unsuccessful Spinoza's philosophy of mind is, I will examine what Spinoza says about (1) the nature of mind, (2) its relation to the body, (3) its adequate/inadequate and true/false ideas. In doing so I will see what problems critics say he runs into and then find out if what they say about these difficulties can be resolved. If these difficulties can be resolved within Spinoza's own framework then his theory of mind is a success. If not, then it is a failure. I shall argue that his theory of mind is a success because the problems that his critics say he has are not really problems at all or if there are problems they can be resolved within his own system.
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- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , December 1984 , pp. 619 - 634
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1984
References
1 All references to the Ethics (E) are taken from both the William Hale White (1883) translation as revised by Amelia Hutchinson Stirling (1894, 1899) and edited by James Gutmann (New York: Hafner, 1949) and the Shirley, Samuel translation of The Ethics and Selected Letters, ed. Feldman, Seymour (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1982)Google Scholar. References to the Correspondence and Short Treatise (ST) are taken from the A. Wolf translation.
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6 My purpose here is not to attempt to outline, discuss, or resolve the substance-attribute controversy but merely to show which view of the attributes is compatible with the discussion of the mind and body in Part 2.
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