Spinoza, Benedict (Baruch) De (1632–1677)

Spinoza, Benedict (Baruch) De(1632–1677)

Dutch Jewish philosopher Benedict de Spinoza was best known for his Ethics (1677), which laid out in geometric form arguments for the existence of an impersonal God, the identity of mind and body, determinism, and a way of overcoming the dominance of the passions and achieving freedom and blessedness. His Theological-Political Treatise (1670) was a landmark in the history of biblical criticism. He was also, in that work, the first major philosopher in the Western tradition to argue for democracy and for freedom of thought and expression.

In the Port of Amsterdam (1632–1656)

Spinoza was born into the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam in the same year Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. His father, Michael, was an immigrant who had fled Portugal, with other members of his family, to escape the persecution of the Inquisition. At that time the Dutch Republic was one of the few places in Europe where Jews could worship freely. In Amsterdam Michael became a fairly prosperous merchant in the import-export business and a prominent member of the Portuguese synagogue.

But Baruch, as Benedict was first called, encountered his own problems with religious intolerance. In 1656, when he was twenty-three, the synagogue expelled him for what the sentence of excommunication described as "abominable heresies" and "monstrous deeds." Although Spinoza had received an orthodox religious education in his congregation's school, he rebelled early on against central tenets of Judaism and began to take an interest in the new philosophy of Descartes, Hobbes, and Galileo.

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