How to Be a Mereological Panpsychist

Abstract This chapter focuses on how Spinoza’s and Cavendish’s commitment to explanatory systematicity in metaphysics manifests itself in their metaphysics of mind, and, in particular, as a commitment to panpsychism. I identify two explanatory problems that a systematic metaphysics of mind developed along either Cavendishian or Spinozistic lines must tackle, concerning, respectively, (i) identifying a plausible mark of the mental, and (ii) developing a compelling account of mental ‘parts’. I reconstruct Spinoza’s and Cavendish’s models of panpsychism, present their distinctive solutions to the two explanatory problems, and discuss how their treatments of mental parthood bear on the so-called ‘combination problem’, often described as the most formidable problem facing panpsychism