Debates of parallelism in the context of Spinoza's philosophy

In the secondary literature there are many different and opposed interpretations of Spinoza, theologically ranging widely from atheism to panentheism while some critiques interpret him to have a materialist metaphysical theory whereas some others argue him to be an idealist. Taking the metaphysical approaches which he intended as the criteria of the study rather than the interpretations of various commentators, it has been investigated that how much Spinoza was able to achieve to consistently present his philosophical doctrine. While this investigation was being carried out, the accuracy of the abovementioned interpretations was discussed and utmost caution was exercised to present the interpretations with their opposed arguments in an objective manner. In this respect, this study aims to inquire the internal coherence and validity of Spinoza's metaphysical arguments, taking into consideration the explanations and the discussions about monism and pantheism, which are probably Spinoza's most notable objections to his predecessors' conceptualizations of a transcendent God and a dualist metaphysical approach. With this aim, Spinoza's metaphysical views were conveyed along with the ranging interpretations in the first part and it was investigated whether parallelism clashes with the union of medieval conceptualizations of God and the two substances of Cartesian metaphysics along with the numerically and extensionally indefinite attributes in the phrase of Deus sive Natura. Therein, such problems as the concept of God as the basis of parallelism, locutions of the attributes with each other and their relations with the substance, modal monism in the context of psychophysical parallelism and the test of truth will be examined. Keywords: Spinoza, Parallelism, Substantial Monism, Theory of Attributes, Psychophysical Parallelism, Modal Monism