Another Kind of Spinozistic Monism

Abstract

1.0 Introduction – Raising the question The momentous opening pages of Spinoza’s Ethics are well known for his efforts to prove a remarkable thesis: there is only one possible substance and it necessarily exists. But concurrent with his drive towards substance monism is another equally striking but more easily overlooked monistic project. This project concerns the relations between various kinds of metaphysical dependence. What, according to Spinoza, are the relationships between causation, inherence, conceptual connectedness, following-from, and existential dependence? My proposed answer is that Spinoza thinks all metaphysical dependence relations are conceptual containment relations, a single kind of dependence that Spinoza labels “conceptual involvement.” I call Spinoza’s thesis that every relation of metaphysical dependence just is a relation of conceptual dependence the thesis of conceptual dependence monism. Although the topic of dependence relations in Spinoza may have the air of hyper-specialized historical arcana, understanding Spinoza’s conceptual dependence monism yields important insights into many of his most striking and pervasive metaphysical views, including the intensionality of causal contexts, the nature and relations of substance and modes, necessitarianism, the demands of metaphysical perfection, and the content of his explanatory rationalism. It also provides us with a neglected step in Spinoza’s proof for his more famous substance monism, one that prevents the whole proof from otherwise begging the question against substance pluralists like Leibniz. And whereas Spinoza’s substance monism may appear to be an historically interesting, but philosophically untenable project 1 , Spinoza’s interest in the relationship between various kinds of metaphysical dependence mirrors a vibrant research project in contemporary metaphysics.