Baruch Spinoza

About this figure

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was a philosopher born in Amsterdam to a family of Portuguese Jewish descent who had fled the Inquisition, and who became one of the most controversial and rigorous rationalist thinkers of the seventeenth century. In 1656, the Amsterdam Jewish community issued a writ of cherem, or excommunication, against Spinoza, a severe and permanent ban whose precise causes are not fully documented but which followed from views he held that the community's leaders judged heretical.

Afterward, Spinoza supported himself primarily by grinding and polishing optical lenses, work that brought him into contact with scientists of the day but that may also have contributed to the lung ailment, likely tuberculosis or a related condition aggravated by inhaled glass dust, that led to his early death. Spinoza's most influential work, the Ethics, was composed in a geometric style, presenting philosophical arguments about God, nature, human emotion, and freedom through definitions, axioms, and propositions modeled on Euclid's geometry, and it was published only after his death in 1677, out of concern for the reaction it would provoke.

During his lifetime, Spinoza published the Theologico-Political Treatise anonymously in 1670, arguing for freedom of thought and the separation of philosophical inquiry from religious authority, and applying critical, historical methods to the interpretation of scripture that anticipated much later biblical scholarship; the book was condemned by various religious and civil authorities soon after it appeared. Spinoza declined an offer of a professorship at the University of Heidelberg, reportedly to preserve his independence, and he lived a quiet, largely solitary life, first in Rijnsburg and later in The Hague, where he died in 1677.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.