In the preface to Elhanan Yakira’s recent book on Spinoza, Yakira remarks that “each of the four parts [that collectively comprise the book] can be considered as a relatively independent essay and even read without the others” (x). Those about to read Spinoza and the Case for Philosophy should regard this remark as a disclaimer, indicating that a consistent narrative will not be maintained throughout the book. Although Yakira does hope that these four parts will add “up to a coherent whole” (x) and does make partial attempts to provide an overarching narrative, the four parts of his book remain predominately isolated from one another.

In itself, writing a book comprised of discrete yet loosely related parts is not problematic. Yakira’s philosophical medley does, however, detract from the overall quality of his project, given the conceptually interconnected nature of the two focal parts of his book. In Part II, Yakira discusses Spinoza’s mind-body doctrine; in Part IV, Spinoza’s theory of salvation. By Yakira’s own admittance, “Spinoza’s very particular mind-body doctrine, namely the doctrine that the soul is the idea of the body, is also the foundation of his theory of salus, sive beatitudo, sive libertas” ^{Footnote 1} (49). As such, it is disappointing to discover that Yakira’s discussion in Part IV is only partially supported by the conceptual resources developed in Part II, and it is all the more disappointing given the originality and perspicacity of the latter. The gulf between these two sections is exacerbated in Part III, which descends on a tangential discussion of Spinoza’s relation to the study of phenomenology, and the absence of an overarching narrative is made more conspicuous in Part I, which contextualizes Spinoza’s philosophical project and thereby provides readers with a fleeting glimpse of a potential narrative. However, if readers abandon expectations of a sustained narrative, then they will be able to appreciate those aspects of Yakira’s book that are most fruitful.

The most insightful section of Yakira’s book is Part II, in which he employs a unique hermeneutics in order to exposit Spinoza’s mind-body doctrine; Yakira suggests that Spinoza’s mind-body doctrine should be considered a noétique—that is, “as an ontology of thinking” (83)—and that the central passages in EII that expound Spinoza’s doctrine should be interpreted accordingly. In order to make way for this interpretation, Yakira must first open up the requisite intellectual space by rejecting parallelism, the standard interpretation of Spinoza’s mind-body doctrine. Within the secondary literature, parallelism is a theory intended to explain Spinoza’s claim that the “order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things” (EIIp7), a claim that is often regarded as central to Spinoza’s mind-body doctrine. Roughly, parallelism stipulates that the set of all ideas and the set of all corporeal things stand in an isomorphic relation, i.e., a one-to-one relation holding between members of two sets that respects the internal order of each set.

Yakira offers several reasons for thinking that parallelism provides an inadequate theoretical framework. The chief concern is that parallelism forces Spinoza to be read within a Cartesian problematic, the conditions of which are rejected by Spinoza’s philosophy. In interpreting Spinoza’s mind-body doctrine as an isomorphic relation between the mental and the corporeal, we implicitly assume that Spinoza is offering a solution to the Cartesian problem of the relation between the mental and the physical. But the conditions of this problem are rejected by Spinoza, insofar as Spinoza stipulates that the mental and corporeal are identical. Parallelism risks describing Spinoza’s mind-body doctrine as a relation between two fundamentally distinct types of objects.

Yakira’s solution to the inadequacy of parallelism is to interpret Spinoza’s mind-body doctrine as a noétique. According to Yakira, the central passages of Spinoza’s mind-body doctrine (EIIp11 and EIIp13) are intended to articulate the ontological status of thought, and we should seek to understand the nature of both mental and corporeal things—along with their relation to one another—within this framework. This approach allows Yakira to utilize Spinoza’s distinction (adapted from Descartes) between esse objectivum and esse formalis (objective being and formal being) in order to explain the identity relation that holds between the mental and the corporeal. Yakira focuses on Spinoza’s suggestion that thought has two distinct aspects: objective being and formal being. The objective being of a thought refers to the being that a thought displays insofar as it is considered as an existent, ideational object, whereas the formal being of a thought refers to what the thought is about, i.e., the reference of the thought. The esse objectivum/formalis distinction can thus be understood as a distinction between idea and ideatum (an idea and what is ideated). The relation between the mental and the corporeal is thus understood as the relation that holds between a thought’s objective being and its formal being, or as the relation between the idea/ideatum conjunct; in the same way that a thought can be understood as expressing two types of being (yet nonetheless remain numerically one), the mind and body can be regarded as two distinct aspects of the same object.

While Yakira admittedly shies away from addressing passages that potentially conflict with his interpretation, he repeatedly stresses that he is not seeking to provide a reading of Spinoza’s philosophy that renders it internally consistent. Rather, Yakira’s concern is to offer readers a novel hermeneutics for approaching Spinoza’s philosophy in order to allow for new interpretative possibilities. Yakira’s book will prove most useful, not to those who are new to Spinoza scholarship, but to readers already familiar with such scholarship who are interested in examining a novel interpretive approach.