Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish origin who developed one of the most rigorously systematic philosophical visions of the seventeenth century. Excommunicated from the Amsterdam Jewish community at twenty-three, he spent the rest of his life as a lens grinder, writing philosophy in private. His Ethics, published posthumously, presents a geometrical metaphysics in which God and Nature are identical — a single infinite substance — and argues that freedom consists in understanding necessity.

Spinoza's political philosophy, developed in the Theological-Political Treatise, argued for freedom of thought and expression with a vigour that made the book immediately notorious. His biblical criticism, his determinism, his pantheism, and his critique of organised religion made him one of the most controversial and influential thinkers of the modern period.