Title: "Spinoza on Ideas: Powers, Awareness and Enactivism"
Time: Wednesday, April 15, 4-6pm.
Abstract: Spinoza’s theory of ideas is unique in emphasising that ideas are powers. As Spinoza memorably puts it, ideas are not like mute pictures on a tablet—they are ‘actions’ of the mind. Despite widespread agreement on the importance of the active aspect of ideas, much of the literature still employs conceptual categories such as ‘representation’ and ‘the act/content distinction’ to describe the structure of ideas or the mind’s relation to the idea. Such vocabulary suggests the existence of a content that can be simply grasped by the mind. But, as I shall argue, the existence of such ‘content’ is dubious from a Spinozist point of view, and largely misses the flexibility and occasion-sensitivity of ‘ideas’. Moreover, casting the relation between the mind and its idea as one of ‘grasping’ leaves in the dark the central role the body plays in explicating what it is for an idea to be in a mind for Spinoza. Thus, in this talk I would like to introduce an alternative framework for conceptualising ‘ideas’, deriving from both the research on embodied cognition and from reflections on 'awareness' in the Buddhist traditions. As I hope to indicate, this reconceptualisation provides new avenues for conceptualising the sense of selfhood and the relation between a particular mind and God.
Sponsored by The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund at Yale University.
