Baruch spinoza brief biography sample

During this period he also entered into a correspondence with a Dutch merchant and would-be philosopher, Willem van Blijenbergh, who had read his exposition of Descartes and had many questions for the author. Van Blijenbergh wondered about the existence of evil, and about how, if evil existed, this fact could be reconciled with the creation of the world by God — and indeed, its continuous creation, from one moment to the next.

He wanted to know what it meant to say that evil is only a negation in relation to God, and how he could distinguish which portions of Descartes' Principles merely articulated Descartes' views and which ones expressed Spinoza's views. He wondered what Spinoza's view of the relation between mind and body implied about the immortality of the soul.

Van Blijenbergh was a committed Christian who believed that scripture was the ultimate authority on any philosophical question it addressed. His approach to scripture was the opposite of Meyer's: If his reason persuaded him of something contrary to what scripture taught, he would mistrust his reason rather than scripture. This was not a promising basis for a dialogue with Spinoza.

Spinoza found the exchange of letters an unproductive use of his time and broke it off as soon as he could. But the correspondence with Van Blijenbergh seems to have persuaded him that he must diminish the authority of scripture before he could get a fair hearing for his own philosophy. By the fall of that year he had set the Ethics aside to return to work on his Theological-Political Treatisewhich he intended to "expose the prejudices of the theologians," clear himself of the charge of atheism, and argue for freedom of thought and expression, which he saw as threatened by the authority of the preachers.

Another stimulus for this shift in his writing may have been an incident involving his landlord, Daniel Tydeman, a painter and member of the Reformed Church. The minister of the local church had died, and Tydeman was on the committee appointed to select his successor. Tydeman seems to have been a theological liberal, perhaps with Collegiant inclinations.

The committee nominated a man they found sympathetic theologically but encountered opposition from conservatives in the congregation, who sought to discredit the committee's candidate by claiming, among other things, that Tydeman had living in his house a former Jew, now turned atheist, who "mocked all religions" and was "a disgraceful element in the republic.

These were difficult years for the Dutch Republic. The plague had returned to Europe in and had been so virulent that Spinoza felt it necessary to leave Voorburg to spend several months of the winter of at the country house of relatives of a friend. Competition between the Dutch and the English for control of maritime trade led to war between the two countries from tothe second such war in a little over a decade.

No sooner had that war ended than there were threats of a new war with France, whose king, Louis XIVhad expansionist ambitions. And there was tension between the leaders of the Republic and the princes of the house of Orange. This tension went back to the baruch spinoza brief biography sample days of the Republic.

In the mid-sixteenth century the area now occupied by the independent nations of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg was a unit within the Holy Roman Empireruled by the King of Spain. Toward the end of the century, the seven northern provinces the modern Netherlands succeeded in breaking away from Spanish rule, largely under the leadership of William I, Prince of Orange and Stadholder of the provinces of Holland, Utrecht, and Zeeland, though his son, Maurice of Nassaualso played a key role.

The Stadholders were originally governors of the provinces, representing the Spanish crown and charged with the administration of justice. During the revolt against Spain, the Stadholders of the house of Orange sided with the rebels and provided the military leadership the provinces needed. Sometimes they worked in collaboration with the States-General, an assembly representing all the provinces.

Sometimes they competed with the leadership of the States-General for power. Later princes of Orange developed monarchic ambitions. In the late s the Prince of Orange was William II, who unsuccessfully opposed the Treaty of Westphaliawhich ended the eighty-year war for Dutch independence from Spain as well as the Thirty Years Warwhich had embroiled most of Europe since before Spinoza was born.

The States-General, dominated by the province of Holland and Dutch mercantile interests, favored the treaty. When William died unexpectedly inthe position of the Orange party was weakened. His son, William III, was not born until just after his father's death. For many years the minority of the young prince provided the leaders of the States-General with an excuse to leave the office of Stadholder vacant.

The functions the Stadholder had performed fell to the States-General, under the leadership of Jan de Wittwho generally had great success in defending his country against many challenges. But as William III neared adulthood, the tensions between the De Witt party and the Orange party increased, particularly when the affairs of the Republic were not going well, as was the case at the end of the s.

Spinoza was sympathetic to the De Witt regime, strongly preferring it to the Orangist alternative. But some historians have exaggerated his closeness to De Witt, trusting too much to contemporary accounts. De Witt's political enemies, bent on discrediting him, sometimes claimed a close association between him and Spinoza — suggesting, for example, that De Witt had assisted in the editing and publishing of the TPT.

And Spinoza's friends sometimes told similar stories — for example, that De Witt had often visited Spinoza to discuss affairs of state — apparently with the intention of magnifying Spinoza's reputation by associating him with a political leader whom many regarded as a hero. Though De Witt and Spinoza would have baruch spinoza brief biography sample in opposing the baruch spinoza brief biography sample ambitions of the Prince of Orange, Spinoza was a democrat, whereas De Witt favored an oligarchic republic.

They would have agreed in opposing the desire of the more conservative members of the clergy, in alliance with the princes of Orange, to enforce a strict Calvinist orthodoxy. But Spinoza favored a very expansive freedom of thought, whereas De Witt recognized the necessity, if only as a matter of practical politics, of making accommodations to the Reformed Church.

Since we happen to have that rare good fortune, that we live in a Republic in which everyone is granted complete freedom of judgment, and is permitted to worship God according to his understanding, and in which nothing is thought to be dearer or sweeter than freedom, I believed I would be doing something neither unwelcome, nor useless, if I showed not only that this freedom can be granted without harm to piety and the peace of the Republic, but also that it cannot be abolished unless piety and the Peace of the Republic are abolished.

In his friend Adriaan Koerbagh had published A Flower Garden of All Kinds of Lovelinessostensibly a treatise explaining the meanings of foreign words which had become part of Dutch but in fact a critique of all the organized religions known in the Dutch Republic. In this acerbically written book, Koerbagh anticipated a number of the claims Spinoza made two years later in the TPT: He denied that the books of the Bible were written by the men to whom they were traditionally ascribed; he proposed that Ezra, the postexilic priest and scribe who wrote the book of Ezra, was responsible for the existing form of the Hebrew Bible, having compiled and attempted to reconcile the inconsistent manuscripts which had come down to him; and he argued that a proper interpretation of the Bible would require a thorough knowledge of the languages it was written in and the historical contexts its authors wrote in.

Like Spinoza, he did not deny that there was something solid and consistent with reason in scripture; but that solid element in scripture was not its theology. Koerbagh was arrested — along with his brother, Jan, who was suspected of complicity in the work — and, with the encouragement of the Reformed clergy, tried for blasphemy by the civil authorities in Amsterdam.

Jan was released after a few weeks, but Adriaan was found guilty after a lengthy inquest, during which he was questioned about his association with Spinoza and Van den Enden. Sentenced to a fine of 4, guilders and ten years in prison, to be followed by ten years' exile, he died a little more than a year after his imprisonment from the harsh conditions in the prison.

The influence of the Reformed clergy on Dutch politics perhaps explains why Spinoza and the other members of his circle showed the interest they did in the work of Hobbes. Probably Spinoza had known some of Hobbes' work for years, since Hobbes' first published work of political philosophy, De cive On the Citizenhad been available in a language he could read since It is likely that this would have been one of the works Van den Enden called to his attention when he was encouraging his interest in the new philosophy.

But beforeSpinoza's inability to read English would have prevented him from gaining first-hand knowledge of Leviathanwhich developed Hobbes' religious views more fully than De cive had. Two events in the late s changed that: in Abraham van Berckel, a friend of Spinoza's and of the Koerbagh brotherstranslated Leviathan into Dutch; and in an edition of Hobbes' complete Latin works including a Latin translation of Leviathan was published in the Netherlands.

Although it may seem paradoxical to Anglophone readers of Hobbes, who think of him primarily as a defender of absolute monarchy, Hobbes' theory was attractive to republicans in the United Provinces because of his advocacy of state control over religion. In Holland in the s conservative Christianity was a problem for them, much as it had been for the royalists in England in the s.

It is no accident that Spinoza treats religion and politics in one work. The preface to the TPT illustrates one way in which these subjects are linked. Spinoza begins with reflections on the psychological origin of superstition, which he attributes to the uncertainty of our lives and the role fortune plays in them. Much of what happens to us depends on circumstances over which we have no control.

We do not know whether things will go well or badly for us, and we fear what may happen if they go badly. So we would like to believe in some story which offers us the hope of gaining control over our lives. In this mood we may believe that the future can be predicted from the entrails of birds or affected by prayer and the performance of rituals.

That belief puts us at the mercy of unscrupulous priests and the politicians who use them. If the politicians use the priests to provide divine authority for their rule, the priests also use the politicians, trading their support for the enactment of laws condemning opinions contrary to those they endorse. These condemnations enhance their authority, giving official sanction to the idea that the priests have a special expertise in matters of religion.

Spinoza speaks with respect of Christianity, which he sees as a religion whose true spirit calls for love, peace, restraint, and honesty toward all. But he deplores the fact that the Christians of his day are no more prone to display these virtues than the members of any other religion, a fact he attributes to the wealth, honor, and power accorded to its clergy.

These incentives attract the worst kind of men to the ministry, men who for their personal ends are willing to exploit the credulity of the people for personal gain, to teach them contempt for reason, and to stir up hatred of those who disagree with them. Spinoza proposes to remedy this evil by challenging the assumptions with which the priests approach scripture.

They assume as a principle of interpretation that scripture is, in every passage, true and divine. Since scripture often appears to be inconsistent, they invent forced, reconciling interpretations whose only value is their apparent smoothing over of contradictions. And because scripture often appears to be contrary to reason in other ways, they are prone to invent metaphorical readings of scripture to make it conform to their beliefs.

This procedure reverses the proper order of things. We should seek first to determine the meaning of scripture and only after that should we make a judgment about its truth and divinity. But how should we determine the meaning of scripture? Spinoza's fundamental rule is that we should attribute to scripture as its teaching nothing we have not clearly understood from its history.

Baruch spinoza brief biography sample: Born in in Amsterdam to

By a "history of scripture" Spinoza understands, first, an account of the vocabulary and grammar of the language in which its books were written and which its authors spoke. This will tell us what meanings its words can have in ordinary usage and what ways of combining those words are legitimate. Second, a history of scripture must organize what scripture says topically, so that we can easily find all the passages bearing on the same subject; it must also note any passages which seem ambiguous or obscure or inconsistent with one another.

Next, it must describe the circumstances under which the book was written, who its author was, what his character was, when he wrote and for what reason, for what audience, and in what language. And, finally, it must tell us how the book was first received, into whose hands it fell, how many different readings there are of various passages, and how it came to be accepted as sacred.

What Spinoza is proposing here is that we apply to the interpretation of scripture the scholarly criteria Renaissance humanists had applied to the classics of pagan antiquity with the exception that for the pagan works the question of their acceptance as sacred does not arise. The result of applying these rules does not inspire confidence in the historical accuracy of scripture: the historical books were not written by the authors to whom tradition ascribed them — Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and so on — but were compiled by a much later editor, whose knowledge of the events these books described was based on manuscripts which had come into his possession but are now lost.

Spinoza conjectures that this editor was Ezra. Moreover, not only was Ezra's knowledge of the early history of the Jews second-hand knowledge of long-ago events, but he also reworked the texts to smooth out inconsistencies and make them tell the story he wanted to tell: that when the people of Israel obeyed God's laws, they prospered, whereas evil befell them when they disobeyed.

Not all of Spinoza's conclusions about the Bible were radically new. In the twelfth century Abraham ibn Ezra had hinted in his commentary on the Torah that the first five books of the Bible, in the form in which we have them, were written much later than the events they described. But Spinoza was more systematic, thorough, and blunt than any of these predecessors.

Unlike Ibn Ezra, he did not pull his punches:. Those who consider the Bible, as it is, as a letter God has sent men from heaven, will doubtless cry out that I have committed a sin against the Holy Ghost, because I have maintained that the word of God is faulty, mutilated, corrupted and inconsistent, which we have only fragments of it, and finally, which the original text of the covenant God made with the Jews has been lost.

It's hardly surprising that when Hobbes read the TPT, he commented that he had not dared to write so boldly. Spinoza did not object only that our knowledge of biblical history was based on unreliable texts, he also criticized biblical theology as embodying the opinions of men whose conception of God was based on the imagination rather than the intellect.

The prophets, he argued, were outstanding for their personalities, their moral qualities, and their knack for expressing themselves in powerful language. But they were not philosophers. They thought of God as the maker of all things, existing at all times, who surpassed all other beings in power; but they did not understand that God was omniscient and omnipresent, or that He directed all human actions by his decree.

They imagined that He had a body, which was visible though you would die if you looked upon itand that He had emotions, like compassion, kindness, and jealousy. Moreover, they were not strict monotheists. They believed that there were other Gods who were subordinate to the God of Israel and that He had entrusted the care of other nations to these lesser Gods.

So their conceptions of God were very inadequate. And they often accommodated their theology to the even more primitive capacities of their audience. In his rejection of Biblical theology, Spinoza even goes so far as to suggest that it is anthropomorphism to think of God as having a mind. What, then, can God be? Spinoza never answers that question directly, but he does say that God's guidance is "the fixed and immutable order of nature.

It is a natural consequence of this view that there can be no miracles, no divine interventions in the order of nature. If there were an event contrary to the laws of nature, that would be an event contrary to divine decree. If God is omnipotent, this is impossible. God's omnipotence also makes it irrational to conceive of God as a lawgiver of the kind portrayed in the Bible.

The biblical God is conceived as being like a king who issues commands which his subjects have the power to obey or disobey. They will prosper if they obey and suffer if they disobey. But the laws which are truly divine are principles of natural necessity — like the laws according to which motion is transferred from one body to another in a collision.

No one has any choice but to "obey" these laws; it is not a contingent matter whether someone acts in accordance with them. Nevertheless, even after stating this conclusion quite clearly early in the TPT, Spinoza regularly adopts some of this anthropomorphic language himself, later in his work, when he argues that the primary purpose of scripture is to encourage obedience to God, not to inculcate correct beliefs about God.

Although Spinoza questions much of the history and theology of the Hebrew Bible — and "baruch spinoza brief biography sample" avoids any extended discussion of the Christian New Testament — he denies that he has spoken unworthily of scripture. Scripture is divine and sacred when it moves men toward devotion toward God, as it can do and often does.

But it is not inherently sacred. If men neglect it, or interpret it superstitiously, as they can and often do, it is no more sacred than any other writing. There is a core ethical teaching in scripture which is so pervasive that it cannot have been corrupted by any misinterpretation: that we should love God above all else, and love our neighbors as ourselves; that we should practice justice, aid the poor, kill no one, covet no one's possessions, and so on.

These prescriptions deserve our utmost respect. If we seek to follow them wholeheartedly, we will be treating scripture as sacred, whether we think of those prescriptions as the commands of a heavenly king or regard them in the manner of Hobbes as theorems about what is conducive to our self-preservation and to living in the best way possible.

Spinoza does not endorse only the ethical teachings of scripture. He also thinks there are core theological teachings which are central to scripture and which are in some sense true: for example, that God exists; that he provides for all; that he is omnipotent; that things go well for those who observe their religious duties but badly for the unprincipled; that our salvation depends only on God's grace; and so on.

In his way, he does endorse these teachings. But his approval of them is hedged. There is a popular way of understanding them which assumes that the God of whom they speak is a changeable personal agent who acts from freedom of the will, who prescribes laws as a prince does, and who has desires which humans will frustrate if they disobey his commands.

And there is a philosophical way of understanding them, according to which God is the fixed and immutable order of nature who acts from the necessity of his own nature and whose "laws" are eternal truths, the violation of which is followed only by natural punishments, not supernatural ones. Presumably the philosophical way of understanding these doctrines is the right way to understand them from the standpoint of truth.

But the popular way of understanding them is not to be despised if it produces conduct in accordance with the ethical teachings of scripture. If it does, it is to be respected, honored, and encouraged. Insofar as Spinoza endorses a minimalist theology, which avoids most controversial doctrines, concentrating on those which elicit broad agreement and which emphasizes the importance of works as the path to salvation, the TPT is in the tradition of Erasmian liberalism.

This outlook provides him with a religious argument for tolerating diversity of opinion in the realm of religion. Philosophy and theology are separate areas, neither of which should be the handmaiden of the other. Theology is concerned with revelation, which in turn is concerned with obedience, not with speculative truth. In judging whether or not a person's faith is pious, we must look only to his works.

If they are good, his faith is as it should be. In the political portions of the TPT, Spinoza supplements this religious argument for freedom of thought and expression with a political argument. He seeks to show, from fundamental political principles, that allowing this freedom is compatible, not only with religion, but also with the well-being of the state.

Indeed, he will go further and argue that the well-being of the state requires freedom of thought and expression. The foundations of his political thought look very Hobbesian; the liberal conclusions he draws from them seem rather un-Hobbesian. Like Hobbes, Spinoza believes that the condition of man in the state of nature — that is, in any state where there is no effective government — is wretched and insecure.

Human beings are very egoistic. Everyone seeks what considerations he would develop to be to his own advantage, with little concern for the well-being of others or the long-term consequences of his actions or the moral repercussions for civil society. Moreover, humans generally have an impoverished understanding of what is in their interest, valuing such goods as wealth, honor, and sensual pleasure more than they should, and knowledge and the control of their passions less than they should.

If they did not have laws to restrain them, laws which alter their calculations of self-interest, they would not practice justice and loving-kindness; their lives would be full of conflict, hatred, anger, deception, and misery. In the state of nature there is, by definition, no human law to restrain them. And Spinoza takes himself to have shown that God cannot be conceived as a lawgiver.

It follows that in the state of nature, though each person is permitted to do whatever he has the power to do, he has no joy from this freedom. But, baruch spinoza brief biography sample Hobbes, Spinoza also assumes that people are smart enough to see that their condition in the state of nature is wretched and to see what they must do to escape it: create a civil society by agreeing with other people to transfer their power to defend themselves to society, creating a collective entity which will have sufficient power to make and enforce laws for the common protection and advantage.

Not only will this arrangement provide them with security, but it will also make possible cooperative enterprises which improve the lives of everyone in the state, enabling them to seek the highest good: the knowledge of things through their first causes, that is, the knowledge of God, which leads to the love of God. Positing this — or anything else — as our highest good is very un-Hobbesian.

In some respects, Spinoza goes further than Hobbes in his conception of what the creation of the state involves. He thinks that when individuals agree to form a civil society, they must surrender to it whatever rights they possessed in the state of nature. If they wanted to reserve certain rights to themselves, they would have to establish some means of protecting those rights; establishing these means would divide and consequently destroy the sovereignty of the state.

Although Hobbes favored absolute sovereignty, he argued that some rights, like the right to defend oneself against attack, were inalienable. Just as Spinoza thinks that the right of individuals in the state of nature is limited only by their power, so the right of the state is limited only by its power. Since it is not, and cannot be, bound by any laws, what it can do, it may do.

Is the formation of the state, then, really as rational an act as Spinoza presents it as being? The state, which can call upon the collective might of all or at least, most of its members, seems potentially much more dangerous to each of its members than any individual in the state of nature. As Locke wrote in response to the similar views of Hobbes, "this is to think that men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by polecats, or foxes, but are content, nay think it safety, to be devoured by lions.

If it did, it would risk losing its power and hence its right to command. Moreover, in the TPT Spinoza is mainly thinking of the state which emerges from this process as a democratic one, that is, one in which decisions of the state are to be made by a general assembly of all the people. He acknowledges that in certain circumstances other forms of political organization may be desirable.

In his posthumously published Political Treatise PT he recommended ways of structuring monarchies and aristocracies which provide the citizens with protection from their rulers. But in the TPT he focuses most of his attention on democracy, which he regards as the most natural form of government. In the state of nature all men were equal; they retain that equality in civil society when the state is a democracy because no one in a democracy is subject to his equals.

In the state of nature, all people are free because they are subject to no laws; they retain their freedom in civil society insofar as they are subject only to laws in whose formation they have participated — laws, moreover, guided by the principle that the well-being of the people is the supreme law, not the well-being of the ruler. The Principles of Descartes's Philosophy contain many of the characteristic elements of his later work, but Spinoza seems to have realized that a full exposition of his own philosophical views would require many years of devoted reflection.

In the meantime, he turned his attention briefly to other issues of personal and social importance. The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus A Theologico-Political Treatise is an examination of superficial popular religion and a vigorous critique of the miltant Protestantism practiced by Holland's ruling House of Orange. Spinoza disavowed anthropomorphic conceptions of god as both logically and theologically unsound, proposed modern historical-critical methods for biblical interpretation, and defended political toleration of alternative religious practices.

Christians and Jews, he argued, could live peaceably together provided that they rose above the petty theological and cultural controversies that divided them. Although he published nothing else during his lifetime, metaphysical speculations continued to dominate Spinoza's philosophical reflections, and he struggled to find an appropriate way to present his rationalistic conviction that the universe is a unitary whole.

Respect for deductive reasoning and for the precision of the Latin language led Spinoza to express his philosophy in a geometrical form patterned on that empolyed in Euclid's Elements. Thus, each of the five books of Spinoza's Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata Ethics comprises a sequence of significant propositions, baruch spinoza brief biography sample of which is deduced from those that have come before, leading back to a small set of self-evident definitions and axioms.

But he soon found himself on the outside of the orthodox tradition due to his radical and unorthodox opinions. In 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.

Translated by Shirley, Samuel. The Jewish Quarterly Review. ISSN See Smith, Steven B. What Kind of Jew Was Spinoza? See Novak, Davided. The question is whether or not Spinoza is really the kind of precedent a secular Zionist like Ben-Gurion was hopefully looking for. The Contemporary Crisis in Western Civilization". Modern Judaism. It is the first inkling of unqualifiedly political Zionism.

Simon and Schuster. So why was he 'cancelled'? ABC News. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 7 October The Jewish Chronicle Online. Archived from the original on 22 January Retrieved 20 June Autobiographyvol. The Anthological Society. London-Chicago,Chaptersp. On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany. Edited by Paul L.

James Cook University of North Queensland,p. Borges Studies Online. Licata, "Spinoza e la cognitio universalis dell'ebraico. Demistificazione e speculazione grammaticale nel Compendio di grammatica ebraica", Giornale di Metafisica, 3pp. Sources [ edit ]. Adler, Jacob In Nadler, Steven ed. Spinoza and Medieval Jewish Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Attar, Samar The vital roots of European enlightenment: Ibn Tufayl's influence on modern Western thought. Lanham: Lexington Books. Bennett, Jonathan A Study of Spinoza's Ethics. Hackett Publishing Company. Buruma, Ian Spinoza: Freedom's Messiah. Yale University Press. Carlisle, Clare Spinoza's Religion. Princeton University Press. Curley, Edwin, ed.

The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume 1. Penguin classics 1st ed. London: Penguin Books.

Baruch spinoza brief biography sample: Spinoza was born in Amsterdam to

Della Rocca, Michael New York: Routledge. Koistinen, Olli In Della Rocca, Michael ed. The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza. Cambridge: Oxford University Press. Gullan-Whur, Margaret Within Reason: A Life of Spinoza. Jonathan Cape. Israel, Jonathan Spinoza, Life and Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, In van Bunge, Wiep ; Klever, Win eds.

Leiden: Brill Publishers. Jaspers, Karl 23 October Great Philosophers. Harvest Books. Kreines, James Garber, Daniel In Melamed, Yitzhak Y. Goldstein, Rebecca New York: Schocken Books. Totaro, Pina Shirley, Samuel Morgan, Michael L. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Nadler, Steven M. Spinoza: A Life. Cambridge University Press. Spinoza: A Life 2nd ed.

Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Nadler, Steven Newlands, Samuel Popkin, Richard H. In Popkin, Richard H. The Columbia History of Western Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. Oneworld Publications. Scruton, Roger Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction.

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Smith, Steven B. New Haven: Yale University Press. Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity. Touber, Jetze Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, — Stewart, Matthew New York: W. Norton and Company. Yovel, Yirmiyahu a. Yovel, Yirmiyahu b. Spinoza and other heretics: The Adventures of Immanence. Lin, Martin September Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

Nadler, Steven b. JSTOR Simkins, James Spring Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies. The Westminster Review. Further reading [ edit ]. Representation and the Mind-Body Problem in Spinoza. Oxford University Press. The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza. Cambridge Uni. Deleuze, Gilles Spinoza: Philosophie pratique. Negotiations trans.

Gatens, Moira, and Lloyd, Genevieve, Collective imaginings: Spinoza, past and present. The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza's Ethics. Goode, Francis, Life of Spinoza. Smashwords edition. Preface, in French, by Gilles Deleuze, available here: "