Notes for 9/24/2026

  

9/24/2026

Can you be in pain and not know it?

[Philosophy Club every Wednesday, 5-6 pm, in the Buchtel College of Arts and Sciences room 436 ("The Cave")

Bioethics Club Tuesdays from 4:30-5:50 in CAS 436.]

How can there be modes of modes?

 

 

 

 

When we say something has properties, we are accustomed to thinking that the word “something” refers to a substance: something that has properties but isn’t itself a property.

 

 

 

So, when I say a hamster is fuzzy, the something is the hamster, and the property is fuzziness. I don’t think the hamster is a property.

 

But on Spinoza’s view, the hamster IS a property.

Specifically, it is property of God (since everything is either God (as substance) or else is a property belonging to God (either an attribute or a mode of an attribute)).

All material things are properties (modes) of extension: “particular ways of being extended.”

 

 

 

 

Like Descartes, Spinoza thought the “true” properties of extended things were the geometrical ones (the “primary qualities”.)

 

And, like Descartes, Spinoza thought properties like color, odor, rough, smooth (or maybe fuzzy) in some sense don’t really belong to their objects.

 

We’ll come back to this very shortly.

 

There is a tension in Part 2 of the Ethics between:

(A)     The “causal barrier” thesis in 2p6 (I call it the “no explanatory crossover thesis”), and

(B)     The “parallelism thesis” (or the “mode identity thesis”) in 2p7.

 

 

 

The no explanatory crossover thesis (NECT) says that explanations of modes are restricted to the attributes within which they are modes. So, modes of thought can’t be explained by modes of extension or vice-versa.

 

But at the same time, the mode identity thesis (MIT) says that every mode of thought is identical to a mode of extension and vice-versa.

This is because at the level of substance, extension and thought are the same substance – they are just understood differently (which is why the definition of attributes in terms of what “the intellect conceives” is so crucial).

 

 

NECT tells us that when we look at the material world, everything we find in it can only be understood by relating to something else in the material world as cause, or effect, or part, etc.

 

And when we look at the mental world, everything we find in it can only be understood by relating to something else in the mental world.

 

As I interpret it, Spinoza is distinguishing between the world of material causes and the world of reasons.

 

The laws of the material world are material laws of nature (which are infinite modes of extension).

 

The laws of thought are (primarily) laws of psychology?

(There is room for LOTS of speculation here. Does Spinoza intend only laws of logic? Or does he also intend to include other mental operations?)

 

 

We can express the MIT as follows:

T(x) = E(x)

(mode of thought x is identical to mode of extension x)

 

But this isn’t S’s own terminology.

Instead, he uses the expression “idea of” to mean a mode of thought, and usually “object” to mean a mode of extension.

So another representation of MIT is:

Idea(x) = x

 

This is obviously confusing, since he also acknowledges that there can be ideas of ideas, and he also distinguishes between ideas of things that exist and ideas of things that don’t.

 

Maybe this helps?

There is a sense in which Spinoza agrees with Parmenides: Everything exists, at least insofar as it can be thought of (especially in God’s mind). But not all ideas have actual fully-expressed material correlates. Hamsters are expressed as existing modes of extension that are actual hamsters. But unicorns are expressed only as “pictures”/representations. MIT tells us that the idea of a unicorn must have some material correlate, but it doesn’t have to be an existing unicorn: it can instead be a configuration of matter that merely represents/resembles a unicorn.

(This is the best I can come up with, here.)

 

S’s “solution” to the mind-body problem is to invoke the MIT:

Idea of the human mind = the human body

 

That is, our minds are our ideas of our bodies.

 

 

But, like D, S thinks our ideas of our bodies are often confused (“inadequate”). This confusion is what gives rise to our ideas of secondary qualities. If our ideas of matter were always “adequate” we would have only ideas of primary (geometrical) qualities.

 

 

I interpret Spinoza’s perceptual philosophy as a kind of indirect realism: When I pet a hamster, I am not directly aware of the hamster. Rather, I am immediately aware only of how the hamster affects my body (my hand). This is where the idea of the hamster’s fuzziness is really based.

 

That is: My awareness of the world is always primarily awareness of my sense organs, and only indirectly of what my sense organs connect to.

 

So, in every case of sense perception, idea(x) = idea(body-affected-by(x))