Question

what was Spinoza's conception of nature? what was his position on the mind-body relationship?

Answer 1

Spinoza conceptualised God as Nature. He asserted that for the concept of God to make any sense at all, it must simply be Nature. This is because everything around us is Nature, including spiritual visions and other phenomena we don't yet understand. If they exist, they are part of Nature. In this sense, God cannot be something outside the Nature that controls it, but must necessarily be part of it. And given that God is omnipresent and omnipotent, it must be that God and Nature are synonymous.

With respect to the mind-body relationship, Spinoza held that the mind and body are made of the same substance and cannot be separated from each other. To conclude that they have a casual or deterministic impact on each other would be wrong, because both these aspects are one and the same thing, and they are thus intrinsically linked.