ABSTRACT
This chapter is motivated by the question whether Spinoza, who explicitly criticizes Descartes on mind and body, offers a viable alternative to what he took Descartes’s position to be. The first section presents Spinoza’s basic conception of causation which seems to lead to a rather weird position, parallelism, about the relationship between mind body. In the second section, the aim is to show that Spinoza’s philosophy of mind and especially his conception of the mind and ideas should be rethought. It will be argued that in Spinoza there is room for an infinity of genuine thinking subjects which are not reducible to bundles of ideas. The reading proposed here may seem vulnerable to Karolina Hübner’s criticism of dependency readings of Spinoza. In the third section, it will be argued that this perceptive criticism does not, in the end, pose a problem for my interpretation. In the fourth section, Spinoza’s view that ideas can be caused only by other ideas will be given an alternative reading to those where ideas are seen as full-fledged modes causing other ideas on the model of causation in the extended world.
