Analysis Of Spinoza's Deus Sive Natura

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This essay hopes to define Spinoza’s reasoning behind his ‘Deus sive Natura’, arguing that God and Nature, or the universe, are but one substance. This separation is distinct to Spinoza’s substance monism, and argued through a geometric essay structure that allows reasoning to be accessible, as well as logical should the reasoning at each step have validity.
Spinoza defines a substance as something ‘conceived through itself’ , there cannot be anything that causes a substance as it is ‘self-explanatory’ . Therefore, Spinoza reasons, it comes to follow that one substance cannot be caused by another, and so two substances must essentiality not share any attributes.

However, having two, or more, substances, cannot explain why this number of substances exist, and so, Spinoza explains the world as having just one substance with infinite attributes, which avoids having to make this impossible explanation. Spinoza’s reasons his argument in proposition V by stating that ‘there cannot exist in the universe two or more substances having the same nature or attribute’ . …show more content…

For example proposition V rests upon axioms I and IV, as well as, definitions III, V, VI. By backwardly engineering the argument, Spinoza lays out a firm, clear argument that builds from the basic definition of a substance to an argument pertaining the reasoning of his

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