Spinoza, Benedict de, Hebrew Baruch 1632-77
Dutch philosopher and theologian

He was born in Amsterdam into a Jewish �migr� family that had fled from Portugal to escape Catholic persecution. His deep interest in the new astronomy and his radical ideas in theology and the philosophy of Descartes led to his expulsion from the Jewish community for heresy in 1656 and his persecution by Calvinists. He became the leader of a small philosophical circle and made a living grinding and polishing lenses, moving in 1660 to Rijnsburg near Leyden, where he wrote his 'Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being' (c.1662), the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (1662, 'Treatise on the Correction of the Understanding') and most of his geometrical version of Descartes's Principia Philosophiae (1663, the only book published in his lifetime with his name on the title page). He moved in 1663 to Voorburg near The Hague and in 1670 to The Hague itself. The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was published anonymously in 1670 and aroused great interest but was banned in 1674 for its controversial views on the Bible and Christian theology. In 1673 he refused the chair of philosophy at Heidelberg University, in order to protect his independence. He advocated a strictly historical approach to the interpretation of biblical sources and argued that complete freedom of philosophical and scientific speculation was consistent with what was important in the Bible, that is the moral and practical doctrines and not the factual beliefs assumed or expressed. He had sent Gottfried Leibniz his tract on optics in 1671, and Leibniz came to The Hague to visit him in 1676. But Spinoza was by then in an advanced stage of consumption, aggravated by the glass-dust in his lungs, and he died the following year in Amsterdam, leaving no heir and few possessions. His major work was the Ethics, which was published posthumously in 1677. As the Latin title suggests (Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata), this was a complete deductive metaphysical system, intended to be a proof of what is good for human beings derived with mathematical certainty from axioms, theorems and definitions. He rejects the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter in favour of a pantheistic God who is identified with the ultimate substance of the world - infinite, logically necessary and absolute - and has mind and matter as two of his attributes. Spinoza's work was first condemned as atheistical and subversive, but his reputation was restored by literary critics such as Gotthold Lessing, Goethe and Coleridge and later by professional philosophers, and he is now regarded, along with Descartes and Leibniz, as one of the great Rationalist thinkers of the 17th century.

Bibliography: Roger Scruton, Spinoza (1986)