The Mind of the Minimal Bodies, According to Spinoza

Abstract

Starting from the well-known parallelism between bodies and minds in Spinoza’s ontology, according to which to each body a mind should correspond, and given the supposition – in Spinoza’s philosophy of physics – of very simple bodies (the “minimal bodies”), the paper faces the question of which kind of mind Spinoza could have thought these minimal body should have. It finally comes to the conclusion that the mind of the minimal bodies is the perception of the bounces and strokes of such a body against other bodies.