Preface By Pierre Macherey; Foreword; Abbreviations For Spinoza''s Work; Translator''s Note; Acknowledgment; Introduction: Why Spinoza?; Part I; The Intelligible And The Sensible: The Relevance Of Spinoza''s Doctrine; Chapter I: The Order Of Philosophizing: Nature; Where to begin; The Essence of a Thing; God or Nature; "Were the Eyes Made for Seeing?" The Ingrained Prejudice of Final Causes; Self-organizing Nature; The two cultures; The Order of Philosophizing; Cause of Itself; Nature naturing and Nature natured; Intelligo, I comprehend, I understand.; The Nature of Things and its Intelligibility; Chapter II: From a Biophysics of the Individual to the Nature of the Human Mind; Few premises about the nature of the body; The First Misunderstanding: "Spinoza''s physical theory"; The theory of the individual: A small biophysics; The ratio of motion and rest; Homeostasis and theory of organism; The essence of an individual; The mnesic trace; Other misunderstandings: Hans Jonas and his vitalist interpretation; Omnia animata: the misunderstanding of animism; Mens, Animus, Anima; Animus versus Mens In the theory of affects; Understanding and the power of the mind: The mens or the mental; Passion of the Soul (pathema, or passio, animi); The Cartesian anima; The illusions of free will; Anima and the affects of animals, between stones and humans; Back to "all are animate"; The stone''s mind; Degrees of Composition and Complexity; Chapter III: MATTER AND THOUGHT: IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCES; Two Reductionisms; The Heart of the Doctrine; Foundational Propositions; Asymmetries within "The one and the same thing"; "Without relation to." An interpretation key; Temptations of Parallelism; Of one attribute over the other: No anteriority or superiority; neither materialism nor idealism; Critiques of parallelism: equality of powers, synthetic identity; Equality of powers: Affects, the privileged locus of observation; Synthetic identity; New misunderstandings; Axioms and the principle of causality; Inversion of Proposition II, in the fifth part of the Ethics; Reasons and Causes; Laws of nature and mathematical physics; About the abstraction of mathematical laws; Between cause and effect: Neither all nor anything in common (Wittgenstein and Spinoza); The generation; Magic thought and temporality; Matter and physical sciences. Physics and biology: a crossover; "Dematerialization" of physics; Reductionism and materialization of biology; Levels of organization and academic disciplines; Abstractions in the small physics?; Abstractions in physics and the corpora simplissima; Physical abstractions in the imagination and real objects in the intellect; The bodies, objects of ideas in the intellect; Chapter IV: THE UNFINISHED; "For up till now I have not been able to set out anything concerning these matters in an orderly way"; The infinite modes and the absence of a theory of physics; The infinite immediate and mediate modes; The "face of the whole universe", matter and thought; The matter-thought in microphysics; The infinite intellect and the ideas of non-existing things; Two ways of existing; To comprehend and to contain; The example: the power of a point relative to a circle; The eternal essences; Essences and existences in the nature of things; Symmetry restored in eternity; PART II PSYCHOPHYSICAL CAUSATIONS; Chapter V IDEAS AND THINGS; The context; "The Mind cannot determine the Body to motion, to rest or to anything else (if there is anything else)" What the Body can do (Ethics III, second move and scholium); Conscious decision is not the cause of voluntary action; Intentional actions performed at a differed later time; The intention; Incursion into some contemporary views: John Searle, Elizabeth Anscombe; A model of intentional self-organization; A time inversion?; Towards a temporal unity of the Self; Neuronal networks; Limits; Elements of Spinozist psychophysiology; Few textual approximations; Chapter VI: THE BODY CANNOT DETERMINE THE MIND TO THINK (ETHICS III, , FIRST MOVE); The new reductionism of method; The multifaceted consciousness: preliminary questions The words for saying it; Consciousness as object of experimentation; William James and the invention of psychophysics; Theory of emotions in William James; William James the philosopher: an evolution; Neutral monism: does consciousness exist?; Consciousness and knowledge in Spinoza; Dreaming with open eyes. The dream and modified states of consciousness; The neurosciences and the dream; Error and Imagination; Progression and gradualism: humans, animals, and others; The psychophysics of James and Spinoza: a missed opportunity; Chapter VII: DETOUR THROUGH COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCES; Unconscious consciousness: the cerebral unconscious, access to consciousness, and what comes after; Access to consciousness; Medical applications; The focusing of attention; Consciousness of oneself; Self-consciousness (awareness) and consciousness of the self; The biological self; Consciousness of oneself, feelings and emotions in the mind-body; Other medical applications; Feelings and emotions: a temporal inversion (James revisited); Affects of attachment and social organization. Humans and animals; Monogamous and polygamous voles; The theory of affects and the system of rewards; Affects of attachment: from the invertebrates to Homo Sapiens; Chapter VIII: CAUSES, CORRELATIONS, INFORMATION, NEURONAL CODES; What are we talking about?; Mirror neurons and the "grandmother-neuron": intracerebral causality; Information and Meaning; Problems of coding; The genetic code; Neural codes; Coding mental states by cerebral states?; "Consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies": A future mathematical language?; Chapter IX: UNCONSCIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS. FROM THE INADEQUATE TO THE ADEQUATE; The pathological, amplification of the normal; The challenge and the bet; Error and adequate knowledge; Development and evolution of human cognition: continuity within the change; Continuity within the difference as pedagogy; Continuity within the difference: the spiritual automaton, or the possible passage from inadequate to adequate knowledge; The way; The two Corollaries of Ethics, II, ; In sum; Return to the bet. The challenge taken up; The language of technology; Human and animal affects.

The role of different languages; Chapter X: METHODS OF RESEARCH AND METAPHYSICAL TEMPTATIONS; The naturalization of the mind; Analogies and metaphors: "intentionality" in nature; Barrier of intentionality in adaptive evolution?; Underlying ontologies; Eliminative materialism; Where natural human languages are eliminated; Chapter XI THE "WHOLE OF NATURE" UNDER EACH ATTRIBUTE; The other attributes: an interpretation; Return to substances and attributes: the first ten propositions; The tautology; The intelligibility of reality despite unknown attributes; Hypotheses, theories, models: under-determinations, synthetic identity; Materialism and the naturalization of the mind: a "folk" materialism?; Spinoza, James, Wittgenstein, Putnam: a welcome atypical path; A double misunderstanding; Chapter XII: EMERGENCE AND SUPERVENIENCE: ANOMALOUS MONISM AND SYNTHETIC IDENTITY; Emergence and supervenience in biology; Emergences: mechanics and metaphysics; The "emergent mentalism" of Roger W. Sperry; Emergence and reduction (Jaegwon Kim); Mental causation; Elisabeth of Bohemia to Descartes; The physical "realization"; "Conceptual" causation; Supervenience of mental states: the rectangle of psychophysical causalities; Supervenience of software: Functionalism; Artificial intelligence. What it means to "understand": the Turing test; New medical observations: idealist temptations; Return to the second move: Ethics III, (no determination of the body by the mind); Psychosomatics: the extraordinary story of the stomach ulcer; Placebos, unknowingly and knowingly consenting to treatment; Neurofeedback and other techniques; Anomalous monism; The Davidson case; Anomalous monism and Kantian moral theory; Diagonal causations; Causa and ratio; Rectangle without diagonals; External operational causation in medicine; Psychophysiological therapies; The two sides of the same coin; The internal and the external; CONCLUSION; APPENDIX: THE CONATUS; Polysemy; The teleological nonsense; Power, force of existing, impulse and essence; The conatus of a stone; Primitive affects: negative and positive feed-back; The moral judgement; From alienated desire to the one of persons determined by their affects to think and act under the guidance of reason, and then to the highest virtue or power; The effort of understanding; From alienated desire towards its liberation; The highest virtue; The presence of the cause of itself in each thing; Bibliograohy.