Spinoza’s Argument for Substance Monism

Christopher Martin is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Toledo.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter One: Spinoza’s Speculative MetaphysicsChapter Two: Substance, Attributes and ModesChapter Three: Why God Must ExistChapter Four: Spinoza’s Argument for MonismChapter Five: Conceptual Independence and Emanation to the RescueChapter Six: Modes and the World that Follows from GodBibliographyAbout the Author

In this slim monograph Martin tackles a difficult question confronting the reader of Baruch Spinoza’s masterwork Ethics: why must God be the only substance, and all other things (including oneself) merely modes or properties of God? Martin helpfully summarizes some longstanding debates in the analytic philosophical scholarship surrounding this question, including the subjective and objective interpretations of the attributes of substance, and whether Spinoza might conceive of modes as properties or “quasi-substances.” Martin develops an interpretation in which substance emanates modes—producing and sustaining them without altering or diminishing its own being. Modes should be understood as modifications of an underlying field, analogous to conceiving of matter as a modification of space. Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; graduate students; researchers and faculty.