Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza

Erik Irre

Modern Philosophy

December 16, 1999

Paper 1, Section 2

If these great thinkers (Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz) were to discuss instead the soul's connection to the body, what might each say (both on his own behalf and in response to the other)? Would they find any places where they might agree? If not, why not? (These are, after all, smart guys!)

Though this sort of meeting would strike me as a debate with as furiously disparate and uncompromising ideals as one would find in a meeting of Andrew Weil, Jerry Falwell, and David Duke, I expect that the philosophers would find some surprisingly common ground. Descartes, the Christian outcast, Spinoza, the Jewish outcast, and Leibniz, the creative mathematician all acknowledge that what we know better than anything is the mind. Given this, we can deduce that any knowledge we acquire of our perceived bodies does not necessarily relate to some external reality, physical substance, or biological bodies. However, from this point on the three scholars meander off in separate definitive arguments.

Descartes reasons in "Meditations on the First Philosophy: In Which the Existence of God and the Distinction Between Mind and Body are Demonstrated" that mind and body are real, extant, and separate products of God. He does this by suggesting that if the body were not real, then God would be deceiving us, which is unlikely from a perfect god. He also arrives at a proof for his mind's existence by postulating the famous cogito, ergo sum Ð'- he could not be mistaken about thinking (for that would involve thought), and the mind must logically exist in order for it to think. Although Descartes' claims of the body's necessary existence follows from the cogito Ð'- if the mind exists, then it must exist in contrast to other, external things - I presume that both Spinoza and Leibniz would take the opportunity to point out that Descartes presupposes the existence of the god that necessarily created his body and mind before speculating on whether or not his body and mind exist. Nice claim, bad explanation.

Spinoza's staunch, pantheistic monist view of the world establishes that the mind and body are not separate entities in themselves, but only two of an infinite amount of attributes of the same and only substance in existence Ð'- God. One can relate this reasoning to two attributes of a red-hot poker Ð'- red and hot. Does this entail that