Spinoza and Practical Parallelism

Hume's treatment of Causality not merely challenges Spinoza's Parallelism, but transforms it from an Ontological to an Epistemological thesis. Hence, what Spinoza conceives as a relation between the physical and the mental aspects of events is re-conceived as a relation between events and the representation of events, a transformation that Kant's response to Hume reinforces. It has been only more recently, by e. g. Alexander, Whitehead, and Deleuze, that Ontological Parallelism in its own right has been revived. Still, these treatments seem to ignore a further species of Parallelism, that even Spinoza only occasionally addresses. Since, every course of human conduct is a sequence of events, Ontological Parallelism applies to it as well, i. e. the sequence consists of both a concatenation of motions and a concatenation of ideas, that are the same. In other words, the thesis entails what might be termed 'Practical Parallelism'. Spinoza offers only brief allusions to the dynamics of Practical Parallelism, but, in characterizing actions as "determined" by Reason, as well as in his advocacy of genetic definitions, he seems to suggest that he conceives Body and Mind as a Matter-Form relation, which would, at least, qualify as a parallel.