Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Nature of the Union of Mind and Body in Spinoza
- 2 Spinoza's Break with Descartes Regarding the Affects in Ethics III
- 3 The Different Origins of the Affects in the Preface to the Theological-Political Treatise and in the Ethics
- 4 The Definition of ‘Affect’ in Ethics III
- 5 Variations of the Mixed Discourse
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Nature of the Union of Mind and Body in Spinoza
- 2 Spinoza's Break with Descartes Regarding the Affects in Ethics III
- 3 The Different Origins of the Affects in the Preface to the Theological-Political Treatise and in the Ethics
- 4 The Definition of ‘Affect’ in Ethics III
- 5 Variations of the Mixed Discourse
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The renowned American neurologist Antonio R. Damasio, in his book Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain (2003), explores what the great Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza can teach us about the nature of feelings. Having critiqued Descartes in his previous book Descartes’ Error (1994), Damasio, head of the department of neurology at the University of Iowa Medical Center, positions himself firmly in the Spinozan camp (Spinoza avait raison – ‘Spinoza was right’ – is the title of the French translation of the work) in order to shed light on the psychophysical processes brought into play by feelings. Damasio regards Spinoza as a precursor of modern neurobiology and confesses:
Spinoza dealt with the subjects that preoccupy me most as a scientist – the nature of emotions and feelings and the relation of mind to body – and those same subjects have preoccupied many other thinkers of the past. To my eyes, however, he seemed to have prefigured solutions that researchers are now offering on a number of these issues. That was surprising.
This interest in the Spinozan conception of the mind–body relationship is not an isolated phenomenon. It goes well beyond the current infatuation of American neurologists because it is shared by a number of French researchers, including Jean-Pierre Changeux, the author of Neuronal Man, in which he claims a line of descent from Spinoza in his dialogue with Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think? At the outset, he highlights the kinship between his own approach and that of Spinoza:
While writing Neuronal Man I discovered Spinoza's Ethics and the full rigour of his thought. ‘I shall consider human actions and appetites,’ Spinoza says, ‘just as if it were an investigation into lines, planes, or bodies.’ Can anything more exciting be imagined than to try to reconstruct human life in a way that rejects teleology, that rejects anthropocentrism, that rejects all conceptions of the world that take shelter in religious superstition – what Spinoza called the ‘refuge of ignorance’?
Throughout the work, the Spinozan conception of the union of mind and body serves as both paradigm and common ground for a phenomenologist and a neurobiologist to tackle the difficult issue of the relationship between the brain and thought.
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- Affects, Actions and Passions in SpinozaThe Unity of Body and Mind, pp. 1 - 8Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018