“A Thing Like Us”: Human Minds and Deceitful Behaviour in Spinoza

What does it mean, for Spinoza, to treat someone or something as an “automata, completely lacking a mind”, in a universe where all things are “animate” and endowed with a mind? By answering this question, I shed light on a complicated issue tied to Spinoza’s conception of human nature: namely, how to distinguish specifically human mentality and behaviour, given Spinoza's panpsychism and the absence of any definition of “humans” in his works. In my paper, I demonstrate that Spinoza’s solution is to deploy what can be regarded as an original kind of simulation theory of mindreading: an account of human empathy, according to which we ascribe our own thoughts and feelings to others, based on our capacity to imitate their observable behaviour. I show that this theory of empathic behaviour explains, in Spinoza, not only how humans recognize one another, but also what counts as a human being. For Spinoza, the attribution of humanity is identical with successful mindreading, and humans themselves are identified as individuals who successfully engage in mutual empathic behaviour.