Representation and the Mind-Body Problem in Spinoza

Running Head: DESCARTES VS SPINOZA 1 Issue II: Relationship between Descartes and Spinoza's mind and body Nicole Yang 20502251 PHIL 384 July 23, 2014 DESCARTES VS SPINOZA 2 Introduction How do the two entities of different dimensions interact? Human thinking and unification of the body are persistent philosophical problems that have been sought since ancient Greece, and it is one of the main problems studied by Descartes and Spinoza. Descartes started this discourse at a rationalism school and Spinoza later answered his job. In this article, I compare contrast between Descartes and Spinoza 's views on human thought and physical relationship and keep Spinoza' s claim. Similarity Descartes and Spinoza have relatively little similarity between beliefs about physical and spiritual connections. The first point determines the epistemological independence of the mind and body.

For Spinoza, the human body has extended attributes, human thought has attributes of thought and expression. Also, the mind and body may express the possibilities of reality in parallel, or the mind and body may be the same substance (substance) considered under different attributes. In the language Spinoza inherited from Descartes, the idea is an expression of ideas. This led to Spinoza's famous conclusion that the human heart is equivalent to the human mind. The parallelism of Spinoza also means that every change in the human body must accompany a change in human thought. "Everything that happens to the subject of thinking that constitutes human thought must be perceived by human thought, that is, if the object constitutes the human mind, the concept is the body, Nothing happens to the body that is not perceived in its mind (Part 2, Proposition 12).