Spinoza’s metaphysics is, in many ways, an effort to tap into the underlying rationalist motivations of Descartes’s metaphysics and to follow through… - Michael Della Rocca

Spinoza’s own view is one according to which human beings and the rest of reality are not explained in such different ways, according to which human beings and all else operate according to the same laws. Such a unification of explanatory principles is the heart of Spinoza’s naturalism about psychology: human psychology is governed by the same fundamental principles that govern rocks and tables and dogs. Thus no new principles are needed to explain human psychology beyond those principles needed to explain the rest of nature anyway. More generally, Spinoza’s naturalism, as I understand it, is the view that there are no illegitimate bifurcations in reality.

I do think a founder has special permission to make sweeping changes across an organization.

Unsurprisingly, then, Spinoza has not solved the mind-body problem. But he has advanced our understanding of it. He has shown how, if one skillfully and consistently wields the PSR and the conceptual barrier between thought and extension, one can construct an argument for the view that there is one substance and one can undermine the Cartesian intuitions that material things and physical things cannot be identical.