ABSTRACT
Spinoza's philosophy is characterized by perhaps the boldest and most thoroughgoing commitment ever to appear in the history of philosophy to the intelligibility of everything. Spinoza offers powerful rationalist accounts of causation, of necessity and possibility, of the way in which our minds and our actions take their place in a world governed by strict causal laws. The purity of Spinoza's commitment to explanation can best be articulated in terms of his commitments to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) and to his naturalism. In Spinoza, unlike Leibniz, the PSR takes on an outsized importance––it's rationalism on steroids, but for the fact that, in Spinoza's eyes, this total commitment to the PSR is completely natural. The PSR also dictates that, for Spinoza, causation and explanation and the inherence of a property in a subject all amount to the same phenomenon.
