Baruch Spinoza

Dutch philosopher of Sephardic Jewish descent (1632–1677), born in Amsterdam into a family of Jewish merchants who had fled the Portuguese Inquisition, trained in the rabbinic tradition but formally expelled and excommunicated from the Jewish community in 1656 through an exceptionally harsh cherem (ban), probably for his already heterodox ideas about the nature of God and scripture, and who thereafter lived modestly and independently as a grinder of optical lenses, refusing every university chair offered to him in order to preserve his intellectual freedom. His masterwork, the Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order, published posthumously in 1677 out of fear of censorship, presents a philosophical system of rigorous formal architecture — definitions, axioms and propositions demonstrated in the manner of Euclid — that develops a radical monism: only one infinite substance exists, which Spinoza identifies indistinguishably with 'God' and with 'Nature' (Deus sive Natura), of which everything that exists, including humans and their minds, is nothing but finite modes or expressions, thereby denying all divine transcendence, all freedom of will in the traditional sense, and all cosmic purpose. From this radical metaphysical determinism, Spinoza paradoxically derives an ethics of freedom and happiness: human liberation does not consist in escaping causal necessity but in understanding it rationally, arriving at the 'intellectual love of God', a form of serene wisdom that allows one to overcome enslaving passions through adequate knowledge of their causes. Politically, the Theological-Political Treatise (1670), also published anonymously, defends with extraordinary boldness for its time freedom of thought and expression as the foundation of the state, and subjects the Bible to a pioneering historical and critical analysis that makes him one of the fathers of modern biblical exegesis. Long regarded as a dangerous heretic, Spinoza's work was decisively rehabilitated by the German Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers and is today seen as one of the most original and coherent philosophical peaks of the entire modern era.

15 works

• A Theological-Political Treatise [Part III]
• A Theological-Political Treatise [Part IV]
• Epistolae (Benedictus de Spinoza)
• Ethics
• Ethics — Part 1
• Ethics — Part 2
• Ethics — Part 3
• Ethics — Part 4
• Ethics — Part 5
• Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being
• Theologico-Political Treatise — Part 1
• Theologico-Political Treatise — Part 2
• Tractatus Politicus
• Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect
• Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (ed. 2)