How did spinoza die

God of spinoza summary
Baruch spinoza contribution to philosophy
Baruch spinoza god

•

Bates College

Baruch Spinoza (Dutch, 1632-1677)

Considered one of the most important philosophers of the early modern period, Spinoza’s writings covered a vast variety of subjects, ranging from ethics to metaphysics to Biblical criticism. His two most important works, Ethics and Theologico-Political Treatise, remain highly influential in today’s study of philosophy. During his lifetime, he took extremely naturalistic views on God, the world, and humans and laid foundations for democratic political thought and critique of sectarian religion.

Spinoza’s career as a philosopher was not without controversy. For the time period, his radical views on divinity and the Hebrew Bible—such as denying humans had an immortal soul—led to him being labeled as a heretic and effectively exiled from the Amsterdam Jewish community into which he was born. Following his death, his works were banned throughout the States of Holland and were added to the Index of Forbidden Books created by the Catholic Church. Spinoza’s ideas and works sparked renewed interest in the nineteen

•

Born in 1632 in Amsterdam to a modest Jewish family, Baruch (sometimes Benedict) Spinoza became one of the key figures of the seventeenth-century Dutch and European Enlightenment.

As a young man, he was considered an outstanding student of the Talmud and a promising religious scholar. But he soon found himself on the outside of the orthodox tradition due to his radical and unorthodox opinions. The influence of a new orientation, inspired by the philosophic writings of René Descartes and Francis Bacon, among others, could be seen at a very young age. In 1656 the Amsterdam rabbis excommunicated Spinoza. He lived the remainder of his life as a lens grinder while writing anonymously published philosophic treatises and covertly exchanging letters with many of the philosophically minded luminaries of the broader European Enlightenment.

Deeply concerned for the political future of Amsterdam and Europe, he published the Theologico-Political Treatise in 1670, which, among other goals, was intended to lend support to the secular and constitutional regime of Jan de Witt, the Grand Pensio

•

In March, 1668, Adriaan Koerbagh, a Dutch physician in his mid-thirties, hired Johannes Van Eede, a printer in Utrecht, to publish his new book, “A Light Shining in Dark Places, to Shed Light on Matters of Theology and Religion.” But Van Eede, after setting the first half of the manuscript, became uneasy about its highly unorthodox contents. Koerbagh argued that God is not a Trinity, as the Dutch Reformed Church taught, but an infinite and eternal substance that includes everything in existence. In his view, Jesus was just a human being, the Bible is not Holy Writ, and good and evil are merely terms we use for what benefits or harms us. The only reason people believe in the doctrine of Christianity, Koerbagh wrote, is that religious authorities “forbid people to investigate and order them to believe everything they say without examination, and they try to murder (if they do not escape) those who question things and thus arrive at knowledge and truth, as has happened many thousands of times.”

Now it was about to happen to Koerbagh himself. Van Eede, either outraged because of his