“A Thing Like Us”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas January 26, 2026 Oberto Marrama
Spinoza's panpsychism, the view that all things have minds, is reconciled with his occasional descriptions of some people as 'lacking a mind' by arguing that 'mindlessness' refers to forms of mentality that are too alien for us to recognize as mental. The capacity to recognize similar mentality in others arises from the 'imitation of the affects,' a mechanism that links familiar mental states to observable behaviors that resemble our own. This mechanism, which enables empathy with 'things like us,' explains Spinoza's harsh stance against deceit, because deceptive behavior disrupts the behavioral similarity needed for recognition.