Spinoza, Benedict de

Hebrew Baruch Spinoza

(born Nov. 24, 1632, Amsterdam—died Feb. 21, 1677, The Hague) Dutch Jewish philosopher, a major exponent of 17th-century rationalism. His father and grandfather had fled persecution by the Inquisition in Portugal. His early interest in new scientific and philosophical ideas led to his expulsion from the synagogue in 1656, and he thereafter made his living as a lens grinder and polisher. His philosophy represents a development of and reaction to the thought of René Descartes; many of his most striking doctrines are solutions to difficulties created by Cartesianism. He found three unsatisfactory features in Cartesian metaphysics: the transcendence of God, mind-body dualism, and the ascription of free will both to God and to human beings. To Spinoza, those doctrines made the world unintelligible, since it was impossible to explain the relation between God and the world or between mind and body or to account for events occasioned by free will. In his masterpiece, Ethics (1677), he constructed a monistic system of metaphysics and presented it in a deductive manner on the model of the Elements of Euclid. He was offered the chair of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg but declined it, seeking to preserve his independence. His other major works are the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) and the unfinished Tractatus Politicus.