73 Facts About Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza, known under his Latinized pen name Benedictus de Spinoza, was a philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin, who was born in the Dutch Republic.

Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam to a Marrano family that fled Portugal for the more tolerant Dutch Republic.

Baruch Spinoza received a traditional Jewish education, learning Hebrew and studying sacred texts within the Portuguese Jewish community, where his father was a prominent merchant.

Baruch Spinoza attracted a dedicated circle of followers who gathered to discuss his writings and joined him in the intellectual pursuit of truth.

Baruch Spinoza published little to avoid persecution and bans on his books.

Baruch Spinoza's maternal ancestors were a leading Porto commercial family, and his maternal grandfather was a foremost merchant who drifted between Judaism and Christianity.

Baruch Spinoza was raised by his grandmother from ages six to nine and probably learned much about his family history from her.

Baruch Spinoza's father Michael was a prominent and wealthy merchant in Amsterdam with a business that had wide geographical reach.

Baruch Spinoza married his cousin Rachael d'Espinosa, daughter of his uncle Abraham d'Espinosa, who was a community leader and Michael's business partner.

Baruch Spinoza's younger brother Gabriel was born in 1634, followed by another sister Rebecca.

Steven Nadler explains that, although da Costa died when Baruch Spinoza was eight, his ideas shaped Baruch Spinoza's intellectual development.

Baruch Spinoza attended the Talmud Torah school adjoining the Bet Ya'acov synagogue, a few doors down from his home, headed by the senior Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira.

Baruch Spinoza possibly went to work around fourteen and almost certainly was needed in his father's business after his brother died in 1649.

Baruch Spinoza's father died in 1654, making him the head of the family, responsible for organizing and leading the Jewish mourning rituals, and in a business partnership with his brother of their inherited firm.

Baruch Spinoza did not openly break with Jewish authorities until his father died in 1654 when he became public and defiant, resulting from lengthy and stressful religious, financial, and legal clashes involving his business and synagogue, such as when Baruch Spinoza violated synagogue regulations by going to city authorities rather than resolving his disputes within the community to free himself from paying his father's debt.

Baruch Spinoza's censure was the harshest ever pronounced in the community, carrying tremendous emotional and spiritual impact.

Baruch Spinoza's expulsion did not lead him to convert to Christianity or belong to a confessional religion or sect.

From 1656 to 1661, Baruch Spinoza found lodgings elsewhere in Amsterdam and Leiden, supporting himself with teaching while learning lens grinding and constructing microscopes and telescopes.

Baruch Spinoza did not maintain a sense of Jewish identity; he argued that without adherence to Jewish law, the Jewish people lacked a sustaining source of difference and identity, rendering the notion of a secular Jew incoherent.

Baruch Spinoza was acquainted with members of the Collegiants, a group of disaffected Mennonites and other dissenting Reformed sects that shunned official theology and must have played some role in Baruch Spinoza's developing views on religion and directed him to Van Enden.

Baruch Spinoza's following, or philosophical sect, scrutinized the propositions of the Ethics while it was in draft and Baruch Spinoza's second text, Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being.

Between 1660 and 1661, Baruch Spinoza moved from Amsterdam to Rijnsburg, allowing for a quiet retreat in the country and access to the university town, Leiden, where he still had many friends.

Baruch Spinoza began working on his Ethics and Descartes' Principles of Philosophy, which he completed in two weeks, communicating and interpreting Descartes' arguments and testing the water for his metaphysical and ethical ideas.

Baruch Spinoza led a modest and frugal lifestyle, earning income by polishing lenses and crafting telescopes and microscopes.

Baruch Spinoza relied on the generous contributions of his friends to support himself.

In 1663, Baruch Spinoza moved to Voorburg for an unknown reason.

Baruch Spinoza continued working on Ethics and corresponded with scientists and philosophers throughout Europe.

Baruch Spinoza's work attracted the attention of the authorities, leading to his imprisonment and eventual death in prison.

Baruch Spinoza's work was safer than Koerbagh's because it was written in Latin, a language not widely understood by the general public, and Baruch Spinoza explicitly forbade its translation.

In 1670, Baruch Spinoza moved to The Hague to have easier access to the city's intellectual life and to be closer to his friends and followers.

Baruch Spinoza refused an offer to be the chair of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, perhaps because of the possibility that it might curb his freedom of thought.

Baruch Spinoza corresponded with Peter Serrarius, a radical Protestant and millenarian merchant, who was a patron of Baruch Spinoza after his expulsion from the Jewish community.

Baruch Spinoza acted as an intermediary for Spinoza's correspondence, sending and receiving letters of the philosopher to and from third parties.

Baruch Spinoza engaged in correspondence with Willem van Blijenbergh, an amateur Calvinist theologian, who sought Baruch Spinoza's view on the nature of evil and sin.

Whereas Blijenbergh deferred to the authority of scripture for theology and philosophy, Baruch Spinoza told him not solely to look at scripture for truth or anthropomorphize God.

In 1676, Leibniz traveled to The Hague to meet Baruch Spinoza, remaining with him for three days to converse about current events and philosophy.

In 1675, Albert Burgh, a friend and possibly former pupil of Baruch Spinoza, wrote to him repudiating his teachings and announcing his conversion to the Catholic Church.

Baruch Spinoza published little in his lifetime, and most formal writings were in Latin, reaching few readers.

Baruch Spinoza wore a signet ring to mark his letters, engraved with the Latin word Caute, meaning "Caution", and the image of a thorny rose.

Baruch Spinoza had been ill with some form of lung affliction, probably tuberculosis and possibly complicated by silicosis brought on by grinding glass lenses.

Baruch Spinoza was buried inside the Nieuwe Kerk four days after his death, with six others in the same vault.

Baruch Spinoza's friends rescued his personal belongings, papers, and unpublished manuscripts.

Baruch Spinoza's supporters took them away for safekeeping from seizure by those wishing to suppress his writings, and they do not appear in the inventory of his possessions at death.

Baruch Spinoza considered The Ethics his chief project and philosophical legacy.

Early in The Ethics Baruch Spinoza argues that only one substance is absolutely infinite, self-caused, and eternal.

Baruch Spinoza takes these two terms to be synonymous.

Baruch Spinoza defined God as "a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence", and since "no cause or reason" can prevent such a being from existing, it must exist.

Baruch Spinoza believed that God is "the sum of the natural and physical laws of the universe and certainly not an individual entity or creator".

Baruch Spinoza attempts to prove that God is just the substance of the universe by first stating that substances do not share attributes or essences and then demonstrating that God is a "substance" with an infinite number of attributes, thus the attributes possessed by any other substances must be possessed by God.

Baruch Spinoza argues that "things could not have been produced by God in any other way or in any other order than is the case".

Baruch Spinoza's approach involves first providing an account of a phenomenon, such as goodness or consciousness, to explain it, and then further explaining the phenomenon in terms of itself.

Baruch Spinoza has been described as an "Epicurean materialist", specifically in reference to his opposition to Cartesian mind-body dualism.

Baruch Spinoza deviated significantly from Epicureans by adhering to strict determinism, much like the Stoics before him, in contrast to the Epicurean belief in the probabilistic path of atoms, which is more in line with contemporary thought on quantum mechanics.

Absolute perfection, is, in Baruch Spinoza's thought, reserved solely for Substance.

That this is what Baruch Spinoza has in mind can be seen at the end of the Ethics, in E5P24 and E5P25, where Baruch Spinoza makes two final key moves, unifying the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical propositions he has developed over the course of the work.

Jacobi claimed that Baruch Spinoza's doctrine was pure materialism, because all Nature and God are said to be nothing but extended substance.

Baruch Spinoza inspired the poet Shelley to write his essay "The Necessity of Atheism".

Baruch Spinoza has therefore been called the "prophet" and "prince" and most eminent expounder of pantheism.

For Baruch Spinoza, the universe is a mode under two attributes of Thought and Extension.

Baruch Spinoza said, "a substance which is absolutely infinite is indivisible".

In 1863, Elijah Benamozegh purported to establish that the main source of Baruch Spinoza's ontology is Kabbalah.

Baruch Spinoza's ideas have had a major impact on intellectual debates from the seventeenth century to the current era.

How Baruch Spinoza is viewed has gone from the atheistic author of treatises that undermine Judaism and organized religion, to a cultural hero, the first secular Jew.

Baruch Spinoza influenced discussions of the so-called Jewish question, the examination of the idea of Judaism and the modern, secular Jew.

Baruch Spinoza's expulsion has been revisited in the 21st century, with Jewish writers such Berthold Auerbach; Salomon Rubin, who translated Spinoza's Ethics into Hebrew and saw Spinoza as a new Maimonides, penning "a new guide to the perplexed"; Zionist Yosef Klausner, and fiction-writer Isaac Bashevis Singer shaping his image.

Baruch Spinoza's philosophy played an important role in the development of post-war French philosophy.

Many of these philosophers "used Baruch Spinoza to erect a bulwark against the nominally irrationalist tendencies of phenomenology", which was associated with the dominance of Hegel, Martin Heidegger, and Edmund Husserl in France at that time.

Deleuze's interpretation of Baruch Spinoza's philosophy was highly influential among French philosophers, especially in restoring to prominence the political dimension of Baruch Spinoza's thought.

Deleuze published two books on Baruch Spinoza and gave numerous lectures on Baruch Spinoza in his capacity as a professor at the University of Paris VIII.

Baruch Spinoza equated God with Nature, consistent with Einstein's belief in an impersonal deity.

Baruch Spinoza is an important historical figure in the Netherlands, where his portrait was featured prominently on the Dutch 1000-guilder banknote, legal tender until the euro was introduced in 2002.

Baruch Spinoza was included in a 50 theme canon that attempts to summarise the history of the Netherlands.

However, the rabbi of the congregation ruled that it should hold, on the basis that he had no greater wisdom than his predecessors, and that Baruch Spinoza's views had not become less problematic over time.