Pantheistic Implications of Descartes’ Epistemology and the Development of Spinoza's Metaphysics

In this essay I intend to describe how Spinoza’s pantheism represents a consistent development of Descartes’ epistemology. While the fundamental starting point of Descartes’ epistemology is the self-certainty, from which the existence of God is deduced, that eventually guarantees the existence of the world outside of the doubting subject, Spinoza’s epistemology is based on the considerations of certain meanings, primarily of the meaning of ‘substance.’ Nevertheless, Spinoza’s metaphysics, as we are going to see, expands on the main Cartesian notions. The main difference is that Spinoza continues Cartesian reasoning in a univocal manner, while Descartes restrains himself from challenging the tradition by insisting on equivocity of all meanings concerning God.