ABSTRACT
Two lines of thought converge in Spinoza's doctrine of the identity of thought and its object. Spinoza's view differs in two ways from some other forms of the identity theory. First, most recent defenses of that theory maintain that the concepts involved in a consideration of material events as mental are subject to a "topic-neutral" analysis. The second concerns Spinoza's claim that those events that, regarded materially, constitute a person's body are not simply the same events as those that, regarded mentalistically, constitute a person's mind. In addition, the events regarded in the former of these ways are the objects of the very ideas with which they are "identical". Spinoza does claim that it is possible to regard any given mode of thought without attention to the object of that thought. This chapter highlight that Spinoza himself is particularly confused on the subject of higher-order ideas. It concerns Spinoza's transformation of Descartes.
