Baruch Spinoza was a lens-maker by trade, but also a Dutch philosopher in the age of enlightenment who held astonishing knowledge of optics, physics, astronomy, and mathematics. His philosophy was inspired by Descartes’ rationalist epistemology, which reflected his own flair for scientific thinking – yet he did not agree with Descartes’s mind-body dualism. Instead, he suggested a middle ground between both monism and dualism as he could not accept the mind and body as separate entities. Following monism he suggested that everything that exists is made of this one substance, however, the substance contains both mental and physical attributes.
Spinoza defines the term “attribute” in his book Ethics as: “Per attributum intelligo id, quod intellectus de substantia percipit, tanquam ejusdem essentiam constituens.” That is, “By attribute I understand what the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence.”
Attributes sit at the very heart of Spinoza’s metaphysics. Due to the relation of attributes to one another and to the infinite substance that an elegant resolution to the Cartesian mind-body problem is possible. Attributes furnish Spinoza’s substance with variety while preventing it from being an ephemeral, homogenous totality—an eleatic “one” of which nothing can be said or known.
