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Rebel Realities

Spinoza’s Metaphysics & Its Relevance For Science Today

Zoran Vukadinovic thinks Spinoza could help us with our enquiries.

Baruch Spinoza was a Seventeenth Century Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish descent, and a lens grinder by trade. Though mild-mannered and agreeable, he was excommunicated by his community for his ‘abominable heresies’. His most important book Ethics (1677) is concerned with presenting the implications of God’s nature for human happiness. It might surprise you if I said that this work is quite relevant for our time, and that it may even help us understand some perplexing issues in contemporary science, but this is precisely what I will argue in this article. Specifically, I will try to show that Spinoza’s metaphysics, as well as being a good system through which to understand the behavior of elementary particles as described by quantum mechanics, also allows us to demystify the mind-body problem in cognitive science.

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