Baruch Spinoza
1632–1677 2 entries
Biography
Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher, one of the great rationalists of the seventeenth century. He was born in Amsterdam in 1632 into a family of Portuguese Jews who had fled the Inquisition, and studied in the schools of the Jewish community, which had high hopes for him. In 1656, at twenty-three, the community cast him out with a harsh writ of excommunication for his views, which he never took back.
He lived simply, in Rijnsburg, Voorburg and The Hague, earning part of his living by grinding lenses, and turned down a professorship at Heidelberg in order to keep his freedom to think. His Theological-Political Treatise, published anonymously in 1670, defended the freedom of thought and caused a scandal throughout Europe. His main work, the Ethics, written in the manner of a geometry book and published only after his death, teaches that God and Nature are one and the same, and that freedom lies in understanding. He died of a lung disease in The Hague in 1677, at forty-four.
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