LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Baruch Spinoza: Ideas
built 615 days ago
Baruch Spinoza used substance for God because the thought of God was not a material reality but a basis for all things that are reality. Spinoza ... stated that humans can only use two kinds of attributes of substance, thoughts and extension. With thought and extension comes parallelism. Parallelism is a theory that Spinoza developed that explained the order between the two of them. “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.”
Source:
With this distinction between adequate and inadequate perception in place, Spinoza introduces a set of further distinctions. He begins with inadequate perception, which he now calls knowledge of the first kind, and divides it into two parts. The first consists of knowledge from random experience (experientia vaga). This is knowledge "from singular things which have been represented to us through the senses in a way which is mutilated, confused, and without order for the intellect"(P40S2). The second consists of knowledge from signs (ex signis), "for example, from the fact that, having heard or read certain words, we recollect things, and form certain ideas of them, like those through which we imagine the things"(P40S2). What links both of these forms of knowledge is that they lack a rational order.
Source:
The only freedom Spinoza recognizes is the freedom of acting in accordance with one's own nature and not being influenced by ideas derived from external things. These, as has been seen, form the emotions, and it is bondage to them which Spinoza calls "man's slavery." Accordingly, the only relief from this bondage lies in acting according to reason, the second of the two forms of knowledge, rather than from imagination, which gives rise to the disturbing emotions. By so doing man acts as himself, and at the same time, since reasoning gives him adequate ideas of the essences of things, or, in other words, of God's real nature, he acts in harmony with the divine character. By acting according to adequate ideas the mind has free play, and its conatus can only result in pleasure; hence the happiness of the sage who in acting from reason has power, virtue, knowledge, and freedom that is ... necessity. The ethical side of this quality is fortitude or firmness to stand free of the passive affections, which is accompanied by courage ("animositas") in self-regarding actions, and generosity in action toward others.
Source:
In the demonstration of this proposition Spinoza says that it is a consequence of IA4 and leaves it at that. Nevertheless, it is apparent that this proposition has deep foundations in his substance monism. As thought and extension are not attributes of distinct substances, so ideas and bodies are not modes of distinct substances. They are "one and the same thing, but expressed two ways" (IIP7S). If ideas and bodies are one and the same thing... their order and connection must be the same. The doctrine of substance monism in this way insures that ideas and bodies, though causally independent, are causally parallel.
Source:
In his lifetime, Saint Baruch was proclaimed an atheist for his rejection of the traditional notion of God—which he replaced with a notion of the Divine Natural World. The concept known as "pantheism," with which he is associated and which is often based on his ideas, only came into being long after his death. It is utterly mind boggling how Spinoza could have freed himself from God, Free Will and the special Divinity of the Human Soul (i.e., lying outside of the Laws of Nature/Yo), and the Mind-Body problem way back in the 17th Century, long before modern psychological science, evolutionary theory, and modern physics. In many ways, Baruch Spinoza was the first Yoan.
Source:
The purpose of this webpage on the Metaphysics / Philosophy of Spinoza is to unite his ideas of One Infinite Eternal Substance, Interconnection and Motion. Recent discoveries of the properties of Space and the Wave Structure of Matter (Wolff, Haselhurst) suggests that we can understand the One Thing which exists and connects the Many Things, as One Infinite Space which exists with the properties of a Wave Medium. The Spherical Standing Wave Motion of Space causes matter's activity and the phenomena of Time. This confirms Aristotle and Spinoza's connection of Motion and Time, and most significantly connects these two things back to one thing Space.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Ideas