Home > Baruch Spinoza
Benedictus de Spinoza ( November 24, 1632 - February 21, 1677), named Baruch Spinoza by his synagogue elders and known as Bento de Spinoza or Bento d'Espiñoza in the community in which he grew up. Along with René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz, he was one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy. He is considered the founder of modern Biblical criticism.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 1656Events Masuria is devastated during the Deluge when it was raided by Tartars and Poles End of the war started in 1648 between Poland, Ducal Prussia, Russia and Transylvania. The only year the British coin Fifty Shillings was minted. Births October 29 ( Ju, he was excommunicatedExcommunication is religious censure which is used to deprive or suspend membership in a religious community. The word literally means "out of communion. Catholic Communion Excommunication is the most serious penalty that can be imposed for Catholics. from the Jewish community for his claims that GodThis article focuses on the concept of singular, monotheistic God . See deity, gods, or goddesses for details on divine entities in specific religions and mythologies. God is a term referring to the supreme being generally believed to be ruler or creator is the mechanism of nature and the universe, and the BibleThe Bible (From Greek βιβλια biblia meaning "books", which in turn is derived from βυβλος byblos meaning "papyrus", from the ancient Phoenician city of Byblos which exported papyrus) 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 TreatiseThis article is about the treatise published by Baruch Spinoza. For the similarly-titled work by Ludwig Wittgenstein, see Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Written by the philosopher and pantheist Baruch Spinoza, the Theologico-Political Treatise or Tractat 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 substanceIn philosophy, substance means, approximately, that element of an object without which it would not exist. In the millennia-old Aristotelian tradition, as well as early modern traditions that follow it, substances are treated as having attributes and mode 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 physicalPhysics (from the Greek, physikos , "natural", and physis , "Nature") is the science of Nature in the broadest sense. Physicists study the behavior and properties of matter in a wide variety of contexts, ranging from the sub-microscopic particles from whi 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 defeat 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.
