This paper investigates how Spinoza provides a theory, consistent with his panpsychism, to account for our ability to recognize human mentality in others. It first focuses on cases that imply a failure of recognition—such as when Spinoza claims that sceptics must be regarded as “lacking a mind” (TIE.48), or when he mentions suicide victims, children, fools, and madmen as individuals whose minds...
In the following article, I aim to elucidate the meaning and scope of Spinoza’s vocabulary related to ‘consciousness’. I argue that Spinoza, at least in his Ethics, uses this notion consistently, although rarely. He introduces it to account for the knowledge we may have of the mind considered alone, as conceptually distinct from the body. This serves two purposes in Spinoza’s Ethics: to explain...