Baruch Spinoza

Who is Baruch Spinoza?

Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish descent, born in Amsterdam, and one of the most important thinkers of the early modern rationalist tradition. At the age of twenty-three he was expelled from the Amsterdam Jewish community for his unorthodox views. He earned a modest living grinding optical lenses while developing a radical philosophy. His major work, the Ethics (published posthumously in 1677), presents a rigorous geometric argument that God and Nature are one single infinite substance, a view often described as pantheism. He argued for freedom of thought, biblical criticism, and a naturalistic understanding of emotions and human freedom, laying groundwork later associated with the Enlightenment and modern secular thought. His Theologico-Political Treatise (1670) defended freedom of expression and separation of philosophy from theology. Living quietly and refusing a university chair to preserve his independence, he died of a lung illness at forty-four. His ideas deeply influenced later philosophy.

Sources: Baruch Spinoza, Ethica (Ethics, 1677) · Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Theologico-Political Treatise, 1670) · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entry 'Baruch Spinoza'