Spinoza v Descartes on mind and body.

Like most philosophers of his period, Spinoza was preoccupied with the central problem of the Cartesian inheritance, n

amely, that of accounting for the apparently systematic causal interaction between mind and body. 

This problem had arisen for Descartes specifically because he had believed that mind and body were discrete types of substances with irreconcilable natures. 

Contra Descartes, Spinoza denied that mind and body were separate substances at all, and proposed instead that they are merely separate attributes of a single substance.

The human mind, for example, was nothing for Spinoza but the “idea” of the human body. 

These “ideas” differ from one another is based upon the complexity of the physical object to which each corresponds.

 It is thus perhaps not too coercive to interpret Spinoza’s parallelism (mind body)  as implying that there is a systematic problem with the practice of referring to mental and physical phenomena as entering into causal relations with one another