Baruch Spinoza 1632 – 1677

Baruch Spinoza was a 17th-century Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish descent, regarded as one of the leading rationalists of the early modern period. His major work, the Ethics, presents a deductive metaphysical system in which God and Nature are identified as a single infinite substance. Excommunicated from the Amsterdam Jewish community at the age of 23 for his heterodox views, he supported himself as a lens grinder while developing his philosophy. His Theological-Political Treatise defended freedom of thought and the separation of religious authority from political power, and is considered a foundational text of modern liberalism. Spinoza's thought influenced both the Enlightenment and 19th-century German Idealism.

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was born in Amsterdam to a Sephardic Jewish family that had fled the Portuguese Inquisition. At twenty-three he was excommunicated by the Amsterdam Jewish community in the harshest cherem ever issued there, for views the documents do not specify; he never returned to Judaism and never converted to Christianity, instead living quietly as a lens grinder while developing his philosophical work.

The Ethics, finished by 1675 but published posthumously in 1677, presents a complete philosophical system in geometrical form — definitions, axioms, propositions, demonstrations, scholia. Spinoza holds that there is exactly one substance, identified with God or Nature, of which mind and body are two attributes. Everything follows necessarily from God's nature; freedom is rational understanding of necessity rather than uncaused choice; the highest human achievement is the intellectual love of God, which is also the eternity of the rational mind in the totality of nature.

Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise (1670) is one of the founding documents of modern biblical criticism and the modern philosophical defense of religious toleration. Long denounced as an atheist and a heretic, Spinoza was rehabilitated in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Goethe, Hegel, and the Romantics, and has shaped subsequent monism, naturalism, and political philosophy.