http://rel” rel=”nofollow”> ….. Date: Thursday, November 5, 2009 Time: 6:30pm – 9:30pm Location: On Campus, Room KH B3012 Topic: Disputing Transcendence …..

Traditionally, Human beings are under the impression that they are special and unlike any other entities, since they possess minds and these minds cause the body to act. Spinoza says that, “We conceive man to be situated in nature as a kingdom within a kingdom: for they believe that he disturbs rather than follows nature's order, that he has absolute control over his actions, and that he is determined solely by himself ”. This distinction can also be traced to Descartes where he claims that we are both non-material thinking substance and material extended substance. He uses the word substance not strictly here as before but as analogous since he asserts that we could conceive of each independently. In addition, Descartes claims that we are in essence, a thinking thing, having power over its extended body. This analogous use of substance leaves use mystified for many reasons. Foremost is the second use Descartes has for the word substance, since how can their be a mental substance or a physical substance if we have already defined that only God can be a substance since everything is dependant on God for its existence. Even if there were more than one substances such as mental and physical, they would thus be by their nature totally independent and not interact in any way with each other. But as Descartes also endorses the common view that it is the mind that controls the body, then another problem arises of exactly how can the mind that is non-material interact with the world, which is material?
Spinoza, again, extracts the rational inference in Part III Scholium II that the, “Body cannot determine mind to think, neither can mind determine body to motion…” Furthermore, Spinoza states besides everything, both mental and physical, having for its cause God, but that more accurately, “all modes of thinking have for their cause God, by virtue of his being a thinking thing, and not by virtue of his being displayed under any other attribute. That, therefore, which determines the mind to thought is a mode of thought, and not a mode of extension; that is, it is not body”. So for Spinoza, we can speak of us being thinking minds and extended bodies, but we it would be more accurate to say, “that mind and body are one and the same thing, conceived first under the attribute of thought, secondly, under the attribute of extension”. Therefore, you can’t explain one attribute by appealing to another attribute.

The conventional conception of God has been, and still is, as the creator of the natural world. In this model, God is understood as a subject, the creator, and the universe, as an object, both distinct from each other. We tend to think of a cause as preceding its effect in time, from which it would follow that if God caused the natural world then God must exist prior to the natural world. Consequently, we come to understand the universe as being dependent on God for its existence as a transitive action, carried from the subject to the object. However, Spinoza does not think of God being the cause of the natural world in this transitive way. He contest this view in Part I Proposition XVIII that, “God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things”. By an immanent cause, or sometimes translated as an indwelling cause, Spinoza means a cause that is inseparable from its effect. He thinks of the relation between cause and effect not as temporal but rather logically inseparable, in the sense that the number two causes it to be a prime number. The number two does not temporally come prior to it being prime; it is something that necessarily follows from it and by virtue of what it means to be the number two and what it means to be a prime number.