ABSTRACT
Donald Davidson was aware of the parallels between his thinking and Spinoza’s. In his autobiography he mentioned the most obvious, between his own theory of anomalous monism and Spinoza’s view of the relation between mind and body. He went on to draw some conclusions about the causality between mental and physical events. All this has been well studied – most comprehensively by Michael Della Rocca in his book on Spinoza.1 There are further parallels in the treatment of causality in general, and in the analysis of causal statements. Other connections could be argued: for example between Davidson’s holism, or his repudiation of alternative conceptual schemes, and Spinoza’s insistence on the causal unity of nature.
