Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza

Born in Amsterdam to Spanish-Portuguese Jews, he gained fame for his positions of pantheism and neutral monism, as well as the fact that his Ethics was written in the form of postulates and definitions, as though it were a geometry treatise. In the summer of 1656, he was excommunicated from the Jewish community for his claims that God is the mechanism of nature and the universe, and the Bible is a metaphorical and allegorical work used to teach the nature of God, both of which were based on a form of Cartesianism. Following his excommunication, he adopted the first name Benedictus (the Latin equivalent of his given name, Baruch). Since the public reactions to the Theologico-Political Treatise were not favourable to Spinoza or his brand of Cartesianism, he abstained from publishing his works. The Ethics was published after his death, in the Opera postuma edited by his friends.

Known as both the "Greatest Christian" and the "Greatest Atheist", Spinoza contended that "God" and "Nature" were two names for the same reality, namely the single substance that underlies the universe and of which all lesser "entities" are actually modes or modifications. He contended that "Deus sive Natura" ("God or Nature") was a being of infinitely many attributes, of which extension and thought were two. His account of the nature of reality, then, seems to treat the physical and mental worlds as two different, parallel "subworlds" that neither overlap nor interact. This formulation is a historically significant panpsychist solution to the Mind-body problem known as neutral monism.

Spinoza was a thoroughgoing determinist who held that absolutely everything that happens occurs through the operation of necessity. For him, even human behaviour is fully determined, freedom being our capacity to know we are determined and to understand why we act as we do. So freedom is not the possibility to say "no" to what happens to us but the possibility to say "yes" and fully understand why things should necessarily happen that way.

Spinoza's philosophy has much in common with Stoicism, but he differed sharply from the Stoics in one important respect: he utterly rejected their contention that reason could master emotion. On the contrary, he contended, an emotion can be displaced or overcome only by a stronger emotion. For him, the crucial distinction was between active and passive emotions, the former being those that are rationally understood and the latter those that are not.

Spinoza's portrait featured prominently on the older series of the 1000 Guilder banknote, which was legal tender in the Netherlands until the euro was introduced in 2002.

Bibliography

• Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being
• On the Improvement of the Understanding (1662)
• Principles of Cartesian Philosophy (1663)
• A Theologico-Political Treatise (1670)
• Tractatus Politicus (1677)
• The Ethics (Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata) (1677)
• Hebrew Grammar (1677)

• The Ethics - at Project Gutenberg
• The Ethics - Split-screen Latin/English or Latin/French
• On the Improvement of the Understanding - at Project Gutenberg

• Vereniging Het Spinozahuis
• The Spinoza Net
• Spinoza and Spinozism - BDSweb