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The Spiritual Automaton: Spinoza's Science of the Mind . By Eugene Marshall . Oxford University Press , 2014, p. 256, £35 ISBN 978-0-19-967553-1
Reviews
Much commentary on Spinoza's philosophy can give the impression - even while acknowledging Spinoza's mind-body parallelism - that his primary interest is in the metaphysics of mind, with the body merely featuring as mind's worldly shadow, or indeed encumbrance. In this new book, which offers a clearly-written and accessible treatment of some notoriously complex philosophical arguments, Eugene Marshall persuasively contends that nothing could be further from the truth.
Placing consciousness at the centre of his account enables Marshall to develop a compelling reading of the Ethics which respects Spinoza's stipulations that mind and body are ways of understanding what exists, rather than different ways of existing. He draws on close reading of the Ethics and other works, occasionally revisiting the standard translations, to argue that Spinoza eludes philosophical categorisation by rejecting the dichotomy between reason and emotion and proposing instead that human thought is intrinsically affective. An appreciation of the ethical dimension of Spinoza's philosophy requires understanding that thinking is essentially embodied and that the physical movements of the body are ideas in action. Although situating his work squarely in the Anglo-American strand of Spinoza scholarship, Marshall eschews the kind of interpretive approach that demands seventeenth-century solutions to twenty-first-century philosophical preoccupations. Instead, he pursues a rigorous and open-minded exploration of the texts which makes this book an illuminating introduction to Spinoza, as well as a valuable addition to the specialist academic literature.
The Spiritual Automaton opens with a succinct explication of the pivotal concepts of adequate and inadequate ideas and proceeds to argue for a series of innovative and sometimes challenging readings of some central themes in the Ethics. Adequate ideas are neither metaphysically impossible on Spinoza's own terms, nor an epistemic ideal beyond the reach of human finitude, but are intrinsic to mind. Here, Marshall draws a compelling parallel between Spinoza's common notions and Leibniz's theory of innate ideas. This leads him to develop an account of the conatus doctrine in which the affirmative or volitional nature of ideas is taken to be the mental analogue of physical momentum...