Peter Winch is, one might think, a very different kind of philosopher from Spinoza. While one might expect the ethical slant of Spinoza's thinking to be attractive to him, there is, even here, a radical difference. For, as Spinoza sees things, while it may be true that geometry cannot show a man where he should stand, philosophy can, through a demonstration by strict geometrical method of the truth about the world, show a man what he should attach importance to. This is ‘metaphysics’ in just the (or a) sense of which Winch was, I take it, deeply suspicious. It involves a picture of the place of ethical thought in relation to thought of other forms – a picture in which ethical thinking is systematically the dependent partner –against which I believe much of Winch's work can be read as a protest. And it involves a picture of ‘proof ‘ in philosophy – a picture in which philosophy is to be seen at its purest in deductive reasoning on the printed page – that is radically at odds with Winch's own philosophical practice. Whether it is, in fact, within a ‘meta-philosophical’ framework of this form that the value of Spinoza's thought is best appreciated is a question to which I will return.

The focus of my discussion will be Winch's treatment of the place of the human body in Spinoza's thinking. In contrast to Descartes (as commonly read), who thinks of mind and body as two distinct substances in causal interaction, Spinoza argues that ‘the Mind and the Body are one and the same thing, which is conceived now under the attribute of Thought, now under the attribute of Extension’ (EIIp21s). It can be tempting at this point to try to fit Spinoza into one or another of the familiar positions available within the philosophy of mind today. The greatest temptation for one with Wittgensteinian leanings may be to read Spinoza as giving central place to the notion of a human being: a single thing – this biological entity – that may be conceived in two radically different ways: as thinking and as extended.