Baruch Spinoza

Key ideas

Spinoza's Ethics argues that there is only one substance, which can be called God or Nature. Minds and bodies are not separate substances but two aspects of this single reality, a view sometimes seen as an ancestor of dual-aspect theories in the mind-body problem debate.

Everything follows necessarily from the nature of this substance, so there is no free will in the traditional sense. A stone set in motion, he wrote in a letter, would think itself free if it were conscious, because it would be aware of its motion but not of its causes. He is a central figure in the case for determinism.

Yet his book is called Ethics because its aim is freedom of a different kind: understanding the causes of our emotions so that they no longer rule us. The more we understand, the less we suffer from what happens.

“All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”

Baruch Spinoza, Ethics V, prop. 42, scholium, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (1883)

Life, briefly

Spinoza was born into the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam. In 1656, at twenty-three, he was expelled from the community for his views. He earned a modest living grinding optical lenses, refused a professorship at Heidelberg to keep his independence, and corresponded with leading scientists.

His Theological-Political Treatise was published anonymously and widely banned. He died at forty-four, probably of a lung disease made worse by glass dust, and the Ethics was published after his death.

Major works

• Ethics (1677)
• Theological-Political Treatise (1670)
• Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect

Schools of thought

Rationalism

Further reading

• EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Baruch Spinoza
• WikipediaBaruch Spinoza