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Abstract
Ontologically, Baruch Spinoza and Rene Descartes take significantly different stands on truth, mind and meaning. It this respect, the latter can be regarded as the founder of modern epistemology, phenomenology, and scientific thinking. Nevertheless, Spinoza's mysticism and resounding Spinozist rejections of Cartesian rationalism can be found at the root of modern analytic philosophy and, even more surprisingly, in most basic assumptions of current cognitive science. The main issue of this "metaphysical" debate is the status of mind, consciousness, mental representations, truth, and meaning in general, and therefore the debate concerns the possibility of a cognitive semantics.
Keywords : dualism; monism; ontology; representation; cognition; Descartes; Spinoza; meaning; phenomenology
Published Online: 2011-9-1
Published in Print: 2011-9-1
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
