Spinoza’s Connections with Descartes’s Philosophy. The Issue of Human Thinking

Abstract

The article makes an attempt to compare two perspectives: a perspective which can be found in Descartes’s Meditations and another  which can be observed in Spinoza’s Ethics. There is no doubt as to the influence Descartes had on Spinoza’s philosophy, yet they had different goals. The concept of human thinking proposed by the author of the Ethics was entirely different from the idea of mind offered by Descartes. For Spinoza, thinking is not attributed exclusively to a human being. It is a universal quality which relates to the whole of nature. It has nothing to do with  distinct state of being human. But the conception developed by Spinoza is one of the most important propositions pointing to the outstanding role of human nature.