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Spinoza

Original nameBaruch Spinoza

Dutch Philosopher, Representative of Pantheism and Rationalist Ethics

Those Who Reanswered "How Should We Live" · Modern & Contemporary Thinkers

PantheismSubstance MonismEthics

Who they are

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was a Dutch philosopher born to a Portuguese Jewish family in Amsterdam, whose thought was deemed too radical and heretical, so that in his twenties he was expelled from the Jewish community, and thereafter lived by grinding optical lenses and devoted himself to writing. In his chief work Ethics he built a system by rigorous deduction in the manner of geometric axioms, holding that there exists in the universe only one substance — "God, or Nature" (Deus sive Natura) — and that all individual things are only modes or expressions of this one substance, fundamentally denying Descartes’s dualist opposition of "mental substance" and "extended substance," and denying too the personified God of traditional religion, possessed of personal will and creating and intervening in the world from outside nature. This "pantheist" stance was in its time viewed as a variant of atheism and much attacked, yet it profoundly shaped the later holist tradition of German idealism, Romanticism, and even modern ecological philosophy.

Primary sourcesSpinoza, Ethics

Key stories

Expelled From the Community

In his twenties Spinoza, for openly questioning Jewish orthodox doctrine (including such core tenets as the immortality of the soul and the personhood of God), was formally expelled by the Amsterdam Jewish community in the harshest of terms, with a decree that no one might have any contact with him. He thereafter belonged to no religious body again, living alone by grinding lenses and devoting himself to philosophical writing, until he died young of a lung disease brought on by long inhalation of the dust of lens-grinding.

Declining a University Chair

In his later years Spinoza was invited to be professor of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, but actively declined, on the grounds that he feared he would have to compromise between academic freedom and the expectations of the religious authorities, preferring to go on living the simple, independent life of a lens-grinder rather than let his philosophical thought be checked by any external authority.

Relationships

Nemesis

🔍Descartes　He both inherited and critically reworked Descartes’s theory of substance

Echoes today

Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.

Einstein’s "I believe in Spinoza’s God"Einstein once publicly stated that the "God" he believed in was closer to the pantheist sense of Spinoza’s "God embodied in the harmony of natural law" than to a personified religious deity.

Appears in

The Beginning of Modern Philosophy: Reason vs. ExperienceSpinoza’s Pantheism of "God, or Nature"

⏳ Who lived at the same time as Spinoza? →📐 Rationalism →🔗 Who taught whom →

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