Ethic
I'm hard at work trying to carve a nice 4000 word chunk out of my thesis for the grad school application, but the overriding feeling I get when reading it again is one of awesomeness. See, when I re-read old papers I tend to notice the things I should have said, errors I made, poorly wrought phrasing and so on. This one, though, I'm just reading and going "man, I am awesome, because Spinoza is awesome and I totally get him", which is probably unwarrented but is still a nice change. I really hope it gets me into the MA program. I'm particularly fond of footnote 39:
It is incorrect, however, to think that Spinoza says that we cannot see beyond the body, that we cannot have any sort of epistemological contact with other things. See Ethic, II, prop. 13-19. Spinoza’s point is not that mind is somehow “locked up” in a particular body and thus unable to “reach” other things, but rather that without body mind cannot perceive. This relates back to our essential embodiment, and is also an argument against Descartes and others’ conception of the mind as some sort of abstract, separate thing. Mind and body are two ways of conceiving of the same things, and although here the emphasis is placed on mind’s reliance on body, the opposite is equally true.
How much of a geek am I?
It is incorrect, however, to think that Spinoza says that we cannot see beyond the body, that we cannot have any sort of epistemological contact with other things. See Ethic, II, prop. 13-19. Spinoza’s point is not that mind is somehow “locked up” in a particular body and thus unable to “reach” other things, but rather that without body mind cannot perceive. This relates back to our essential embodiment, and is also an argument against Descartes and others’ conception of the mind as some sort of abstract, separate thing. Mind and body are two ways of conceiving of the same things, and although here the emphasis is placed on mind’s reliance on body, the opposite is equally true.
How much of a geek am I?
It only took me three readings of footnote 39 to completely follow what it is trying to say. That actually ranks it quite high on the intelligibility scale for philosophical works, at least from my point of view. :-P
I do know what you mean about some school work products being better than others in hindsight. I am fabulously proud of some of the work I did in high school and early in my university experience, and woefully embarrassed about most of the work I did later on.
Posted by
Anonymous |
4:19 PM
Well, it is a footnote out of context. It reads pretty easily to me, but I wrote it, after all.
Posted by
Ian |
5:13 PM