The Long ConversationA timeline of world philosophy

Philosopher

Baruch Spinoza

1632–1677

Also known as Benedictus de Spinoza, Bento de Espinosa

Rationalist who identified God with Nature and set out his ethics in the form of geometrical proofs.

Portrait of a man with long dark hair and a thin moustache
Anonymous portrait, about 1665, painted during Spinoza’s lifetime.Anonymous · Public domain · See the original

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

Ethics, part 5, proposition 42, scholium, translated by R. H. M. Elwes

Born into Amsterdam’s Portuguese-Jewish community and expelled from it in 1656, Spinoza argued that there is only one substance, which can be called either God or Nature. Everything, including the human mind, is a part of it and follows from its nature by necessity. His Ethics presents this system in the manner of Euclid’s geometry, and argues that freedom and happiness come from understanding that necessity.

His defence of freedom of thought and his critical reading of scripture made him one of the most controversial thinkers of his age.

Key ideas

God, or Nature
Reality contains just one substance, which is infinite and the cause of itself. It is God, and everything else that exists is in God. Spinoza summed this up as “God, or Nature” (Deus, sive Natura).
Argued against by Anne Conway’s Everything is alive
Thought and extension
Thought and extension are two attributes of the one substance. Bodies express extension and ideas express thought, and because the two have nothing in common, the physical and the mental are each causally closed.
Argues against René Descartes’s Mind and body
No free will
Human beings are part of nature, caught up in the same chains of cause and effect as everything else. “In the Mind there is no absolute, or free, will”; our choices are as necessarily determined as any natural event.
Freedom through understanding
We can’t escape the passions entirely, but we can moderate them by understanding. Our virtue lies in pursuing knowledge, and the best kind is an intuitive grasp of the essences of things.
Religion and the free state
In the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza attacked superstition fostered by the clergy and argued that freedom of thought and religion is not only compatible with a well-ordered state but essential to it.
Tradition
Western
Region
Dutch Republic

Influences

Influenced by

Baruch Spinoza1632–1677

Influenced

Influenced by

Baruch Spinoza1632–1677

Influenced

Where these links come from
  • Baruch Spinoza drew on Maimonides. Source: Steven Nadler, Baruch Spinoza, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Baruch Spinoza drew on Hasdai Crescas. Source: Shalom Sadik, Hasdai Crescas, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Baruch Spinoza drew on Thomas Hobbes. Source: Steven Nadler, Baruch Spinoza, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Baruch Spinoza drew on and argued against René Descartes. Source: Steven Nadler, Baruch Spinoza, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Anne Conway argued against Baruch Spinoza. Source: Sarah Hutton, Lady Anne Conway, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz argued against Baruch Spinoza. Source: Brandon C. Look, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Salomon Maimon drew on Baruch Spinoza. Source: Peter Thielke and Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Salomon Maimon, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • G. W. F. Hegel drew on Baruch Spinoza. Source: Paul Redding, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Gilles Deleuze drew on Baruch Spinoza. Source: Daniel Smith, John Protevi and Daniela Voss, Gilles Deleuze, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Key works

Terms on this page

Deus, sive Natura
“God, or Nature”: the phrase in the Latin edition of Spinoza’s Ethics that sums up his metaphysics of God.

All terms in the glossary

Sources

  1. Steven Nadler, Baruch Spinoza, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  2. Kenneth Seeskin, Maimonides, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  3. Shalom Sadik, Hasdai Crescas, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy