Representation and the Mind-Body Problem in Spinoza

"The exact, complicated and subtle treatment of Spinoza's ideas, and the central problem of knowledge philosophy ... Della Loca advocates an explanation that may be the subject of Spinoza's discussion in the coming years.In general, Della Rocca showed that he is a primitive, subtle and often brilliant interpreter of Spinoza - - Nicholas Jolley of the University of California, San Diego

"For Spinoza scholars, historians of general philosophy, advanced philosophical history, and those who are interested in early cognitive psychology, this will be a classical reading." This is one of the most exciting works in history The philosophy that I have been reading for a long time ... should be read most widely. "- Don Garrett of the University of Utah

Spinoza's mind theory is totally representative mind theory. For Spinoza psychology is only representative content. In Ethics 2p7, he argues that "the order and connection of thinking is consistent with the order and connection of things", that is, parallel ideas exist for each extended objective. This is called parallel processing. From this point of view, Spinoza can develop his theory of mind: "The first thing that makes up the actual existence of human thought is only the concept of a single existing thing" (2 p 11) . Each heart is an idea that has its own object in itself - in the case of a human being, the mind is the thought of the body and everything that happens in the body is expressed in the mind (he discussed in 2 p 12 and 2 p 13 like) . The mind is a special idea representing a single object, the body in which it is parallel. (Please refer to Della Rocca 1996 for details on Spinoza's representative mind theory.)

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).