Spinoza and Contemporary Biology: Lectures on the Philosophy of Biology and Cognitivism

Cover
Introduction: Why Spinoza?
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Translator’s Note
Acknowledgement
Abbreviations
Part I: The Intelligible and the Sensible: The Actualities of Spinoza’s Doctrine
	Chapter I The Order of Philosophising: Nature
		Where to begin?
			The essence of a thing
			God or Nature
		‘Were the eyes made for seeing?’ The ingrained prejudice of final causes
		Self-organising Nature
		The two cultures
			The order of philosophising
			Cause of itself
			Nature naturing and Nature natured
		Intelligo, I comprehend, I understand…
			The nature of things and its intelligibility
	Chapter II From a Biophysics of the Individual to the Nature of the Human Mind
		Some premises on the nature of bodies
			The first misunderstanding: ‘Spinoza’s physical theory’
			The theory of the individual: a small biophysics
				The ratio of motion and rest
				Homeostasis and theory of the organism
				The essence of an individual
				The mnesic trace
		Other misunderstandings: Hans Jonas’s vitalist interpretation
		Omnia animata: the animist misunderstanding
			Mens, animus, anima
			Animus versus mens in the theory of affects
			Understanding and the power of the mind: the mens or the mental
			Passion of the soul (pathema, or passio, animi)
		The Cartesian anima
			The illusions of free will
			Anima and the affects of animals: between stones and humans
		Back to ‘all are animate’
			The stone’s mind
			Degrees of composition and complexity
	Chapter III Matter and Thought: Identity and Differences
		Two reductionisms
			The heart of the doctrine
		Foundational propositions
		Asymmetries within ‘the one and the same thing’
			‘Without relation to…’: an interpretative key
		Temptations of parallelism
			Of one attribute over the other: no anteriority or superiority; neither materialism nor idealism
		Critiques of parallelism: equality of powers, synthetic identity
			Equality of powers: the affects, privileged locus of observation
			Synthetic identity
			New misunderstandings
		Axioms and the principle of causality
			Inversion of proposition II, 7 in the fifth part of the Ethics
			Reasons and causes
		The laws of nature and mathematical physics
			On the abstraction of mathematical laws
			Between cause and effect: neither all nor nothing in common (Wittgenstein and Spinoza)
			Generation
			Magical thought and temporality
		Matter and the physical sciences: physics and biology – a crossover
			The ‘dematerialisation’ of physics
			Reductionism and the materialisation of biology
			Levels of organisation and academic disciplines
		Abstractions in the small physics?
			Abstractions in physics and the corpora simplissima
			Physical abstractions in the imagination and real objects in the intellect
			The Bodies: objects of ideas in the intellect
	Chapter IV The Unfinished
		‘For up till now I have not been able to set out anything concerning [these matters] in an orderly way’
		The infinite modes and the absence of a theory of physics
			The infinite immediate and mediate modes
			The ‘face of the whole universe’: matter and thought
			The matter-thought of microphysics
		The infinite intellect and the ideas of nonexisting things
			Two ways of existing
			To comprehend and to contain
			The example: the power of a point relative to a circle
			The eternal essences
			Essences and existences in the nature of things
			Symmetry restored in eternity
Part II Psychophysical Causalities
	Chapter V Ideas and Things
		The context
		‘The Mind cannot determine the Body to motion, to rest or to anything else (if there is anything else)’: what the body can do (Ethics III, 2 second movement and scholium)
		Conscious decisions are not the cause of voluntary action
		Intentional actions performed after a delay
		Intention
		Incursion into some contemporary views: John Searle, Elizabeth Anscombe
		A model of intentional self-organisation
			A temporal inversion?
			Towards a temporal unity of the self
		Neural networks
			Limits
			Elements of Spinozist psychophysiology
		Some textual convergences
	Chapter VI The Body Cannot Determine the Mind to Think (Ethics III, 2, First Movement)
		The new methodological reductionism
		Multiform consciousness: preliminary questions – the words we need
		Consciousness as object of experimentation
		William James and the invention of psychophysics
			The theory of emotions in William James
			William James, philosopher: an evolution
			Neutral monism: does consciousness exist?
		Consciousness and knowledge in Spinoza
			Dreaming with open eyes: the dream and modified states of consciousness
			The neurosciences and the dream
		Error and imagination
			Progression and gradualism: humans, animals and others
		The psychophysics of James and Spinoza: the missed encounter
	Chapter VII Detour via the Cognitive Neurosciences
		The conscious unconscious: the cerebral unconscious, access to consciousness, and what comes after
		Access to consciousness
		Medical applications
		Focusing attention
		Self-consciousness
			Self-consciousness (self-awareness) and consciousness of the self
		The biological self
		Self-consciousness, feelings and emotions in the mind–body
			Other medical applications
			Feelings and emotions: a temporal inversion (James revisited)
		Affects of attachment and social organisation: humans and animals
			Monogamous and polygamous voles
			The theory of affects and the reward system
			Affects of attachment: from invertebrates to Homo sapiens
	Chapter VIII Causes, Correlations, Information, Neural Codes
		What are we talking about?
		Mirror neurons and the ‘grandmother-neuron’: intracerebral causality
		Information and meaning
			Problems of coding
			The genetic code
			Neural codes
			Coding mental states by cerebral states?
			‘Consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies’: a future mathematical language?
	Chapter IX Unconscious Consciousness: From the Inadequate to the Adequate
		The pathological, amplification of the normal
		The challenge and the wager
			Error and adequate knowledge
		Development and evolution of human cognition: continuity within change
			Continuity within difference as pedagogy
			Continuity within difference: the spiritual automaton, or the possible passage from inadequate to adequate knowledge
			The way
			The two corollaries of Ethics II, 16
			In summary
			Return to the wager: taking up the challenge
			The language of technology
			Human and animal affects: the role of different languages
	Chapter X Research Methods and Metaphysical Temptations
		The naturalisation of the mind
			Analogies and metaphors: ‘intentionality’ in nature
			Barrier of intentionality in adaptive evolution?
			Underlying ontologies
			Eliminative materialism
			When natural human languages are eliminated
	Chapter XI The ‘Whole of Nature’ Under Each Attribute
		The other attributes: an interpretation
			Back to substances and attributes: the first ten propositions
			The tautology
			The intelligibility of the real, despite the unknown attributes
		Hypotheses, theories, models: under-determinations, synthetic identity
		Materialism and the naturalisation of the mind: a ‘folk’ materialism?
			Spinoza, James, Wittgenstein, Putnam: a welcome atypical path
			A double misunderstanding
	Chapter XII Emergence And Supervenience: Anomalous Monism and Synthetic Identity
		Emergence and supervenience in biology
		Emergences: mechanical and metaphysical
		The ‘emergent mentalism’ of Roger W. Sperry
		Emergence and reduction (Jaegwon Kim)
			Mental causation
			Elisabeth of Bohemia to Descartes
			Physical ‘realisation’
			‘Conceptual’ causation
		Supervenience of mental states: the rectangle of psychophysical causalities
		Supervenience of software: functionalism
			Artificial intelligence; what it means to ‘understand’; the Turing test
		New medical observations: idealist temptations
			Return to the second movement of Ethics III, 2 (no determination of the body by the mind)
			Psychosomatics: the extraordinary story of the stomach ulcer
			Placebos, unknowingly and knowingly consenting to treatment
			Neurofeedback and other techniques
			Anomalous monism
		The Davidson case
			Anomalous monism and Kantian moral theory
			Diagonal causalities
			Causa and ratio
			Rectangle without diagonals
		External operational causality in medicine
			Psychophysiological therapies
			The two sides of the same coin
			The internal and the external
Conclusion
Appendix The Conatus
	Polysemy
		The teleological misunderstanding
		Power, force of existing, impulse and essence
		The conatus of a stone
		Primitive affects: negative and positive feedback
			Moral judgement
		From alienated desire to the desire of those determined by their affects to think and act under the guidance of reason, and then towards the highest virtue or power
			The effort of understanding
			From alienated desire towards its liberation
			The highest virtue
			The presence of the cause of itself in each thing
Bibliography
Index Nominum
Index Rerum
Index Locorum