Michael Della Rocca Quotes

Rethinking Spinoza in light of the Principle of Sufficient Reason promises to be important not only for our understanding of Spinoza, but also for our understanding of the philosophical issues Spinoza deals with and that continue to trouble philosophers today.

We have a long history here of integrating the technologies closer together. This is what customers have been asking us to do. It is what we are doing. It is working extremely well. There is much, much more to come here.

As always with Spinoza, it is helpful to begin with God. The system of ideas that are parallel to modes of extension constitutes God’s infinite intellect.

Spinoza’s naturalism and rationalism are nowhere more evident and more relevant to contemporary philosophy than in his philosophy of mind. All there is to thought is the having of ideas, representations of certain things. Thus, in laying down requirements on what it is to have an idea or representation of an object, Spinoza is articulating the essence of the mental.

Spinoza’s metaphysics is, in many ways, an effort to tap into the underlying rationalist motivations of Descartes’s metaphysics and to follow through on these motivations more consistently than Descartes ever did. Employing the Cartesian notions of substance, attribute, and mode, and wielding strongly rationalist principles only hinted at in Descartes—such as the PSR and the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles—Spinoza is able to mount a powerful argument for substance monism, for the view that there is, fundamentally, only one thing in the world.

Spinoza can be seen as a pure philosopher, always seeking explanation, always refusing to be satisfied with primitive, inexplicable notions. This purity is most evident in his commitment to the principle that each fact has an explanation, that for each thing that exists there is an explanation that suffices for one to see why that thing exists. Although Spinoza does not himself use the term, this principle is known as the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR).

What would I do [with Apple]? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.

Every technology creates good and bad. You can sit here and say, "AI is really bad, we shouldn't have AI" - that's nonsense. We have to figure out how to use it in a responsible way, that's our job.

Unsurprisingly, then, Spinoza has not solved the mind-body problem. But he has advanced our understanding of it. He has shown how, if one skillfully and consistently wields the PSR and the conceptual barrier between thought and extension, one can construct an argument for the view that there is one substance and one can undermine the Cartesian intuitions that material things and physical things cannot be identical.

According to Spinoza’s system, all reality flows with strict necessity from the nature of God. With the geometrical method, Spinoza captures the structure of this reality by deducing philosophical conclusions about reality from definitions which express the nature of God.

Spinoza’s parallelism embodies in many ways a deeply anti-Cartesian view. By keeping the causal chains of modes of extension somehow separate from the causal chains of modes of thought, Spinoza is guided by his overarching denial of any explanatory connections between the mental and the physical, i.e. of connections of the kind that Descartes, in his account of mind-body interaction, quite happily embraces. But precisely because Spinoza separates the causal chains in this way, there might be thought to be a crucial point of agreement between Descartes and Spinoza on the nature of mind-body relations.

Try never to be the smartest person in the room. And if you are, I suggest you invite smarter people … or find a different room..

I do think a founder has special permission to make sweeping changes across an organization.

Spinoza’s own view is one according to which human beings and the rest of reality are not explained in such different ways, according to which human beings and all else operate according to the same laws. Such a unification of explanatory principles is the heart of Spinoza’s naturalism about psychology: human psychology is governed by the same fundamental principles that govern rocks and tables and dogs. Thus no new principles are needed to explain human psychology beyond those principles needed to explain the rest of nature anyway. More generally, Spinoza’s naturalism, as I understand it, is the view that there are no illegitimate bifurcations in reality.

How many things are there in the world? Spinoza’s answer: one.