Baruch Spinoza

1632-1677 · Dutch (Sephardic Jewish) · Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Biblical Scholarship

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

At twenty-three, Baruch Spinoza received the most ferocious excommunication on record from the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish community — its Hebrew writ condemning "abominable heresies" and "monstrous deeds" without specifying either. He spent the rest of his life outside every religious institution, grinding lenses for income, writing in Latin, and producing a system that genuinely alarmed the seventeenth century: God and Nature are one and the same thing.

Topics Baruch Spinoza addresses

• substance monism
• Deus sive Natura
• substance, mode, attribute
• the Principle of Sufficient Reason
• causa sui
• necessitarianism
• natura naturans and natura naturata
• the parallelism doctrine
• mind as idea of body
• adequate and inadequate ideas
• the three kinds of knowledge
• common notions
• the conatus doctrine
• the affects
• freedom as determination by one's own essence
• the bondage of the passions
• virtue as power of acting
• the free man
• the intellectual love of God
• blessedness as virtue itself
• the eternity of the mind
• sub specie aeternitatis
• the rejection of imperium in imperio
• prophecy as imagination

Converse with Baruch Spinoza on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Baruch Spinoza's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.