DRAFT PAPER (18/02/22) 1 Spinoza’s Substance Monism Jack Stetter (Loyola – New Orleans) For Kevin Morris’ (Tulane) Graduate Seminar in Metaphysics (Feb. 24, 2022) 1. Introduction I would like to suggest that among the thirty six propositions of the first part of Spinoza’s Ethics there are two which stand out as especially representative of the monistic foundation of the doctrine. The first is Proposition 14: “There is not nor can one conceive a substance apart from God” (Praeter Deum nulla dari neque concipi potest substantia). The second is Proposition 18: “God is the immanent, and not transitive, cause of all things” (Deus est omnium rerum causa immanens, non vero transiens). The latter is in fact demonstrated by a double reference to Proposition 14. The terms of art employed — causa immanens, causa transiens — are transmitted to Spinoza via a form of late Scholasticism such as he would have known in the work of the Dutch seventeenth-century philosopher and Leiden professor A. Heereboord . Spinoza explains in the unpublished and unfinished Short Treatise (Korte Verhandeling) that “God is an immanent and not transitive cause, in that he acts in himself, and not outside of himself, as nothing exists outside of him” (Part 1, Ch. 3). We can glean from these two propositions that Spinoza’s monism has to do with his use of the concepts of God and substance but also “thing” (or, more often, “mode”) and cause. Spinoza’s predecessors too, most prominently Descartes, took up the same Scholastic conceptual material, yet in their hands never was monism so fully and unapologetically pursued. One does find in the later stages of the Renaissance that Giordano Bruno (burned alive for heresy by the Papacy in Rome in 1600) articulates something near enough to monism: a cosmology of naturalistic pantheism, God being present throughout the infinity of the cosmos and innumerable stars (e.g. in his 1584 pamphlet De l'infinito universo et mondi). There is some question as to Spinoza’s own relation to the Renaissance Neo-Platonic tradition, which he may have come into contact with thanks to the writings of Juda Abravanel (aka Léon l’Hébreu).