Baruch Spinoza Life and Background He was born in Amsterdam, in 1632.
His father, Michael Spinoza, ensured that he acquired a knowledge of Hebrew and a familiarity with the Bible and the Talmud at the local rabbinic school. He knew how to speak Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and Latin. In 1656, he was excommunicated from the Jewish synagogue. As a living, he manufactured spectacles and other optical instruments this gave him leisure and opportunity for scientific reflection and research. He later on moved to Rijnsburg in 1660, and was invited by the Royal Society to enter into a philosophical correspondence about the Baconian and Cartesian systems. He never occupied an academic post, and never married. He died in 1667 of phthisis. The hallmarks of Aristotelian and Scholastic distinctions (concepts) were collapsed by Spinoza. His philosophy is regarded as the most extravagant form of rationalism.
Works and Contributions Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding (Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione) A Short Treatise on God, Man, and Happiness In 1663, he published a solemn exposition in geometrical form of Descartes Principle of Philosophy. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) Ethics Demonstrated according to the Geometrical Order (1675): 1) of God 2) of the nature and origin of the mind 3) of the origin and nature of passions 4) of human bondage 5) of human freedom He did his best to make his work transparent, without hidden assumptions and none but logical connections between one proposition and the next.
Knowledge Three levels of knowledge: imagination, reason and intuition. Ideas as both concepts and propositions, both are inseparable. There is certainty in the possession of adequate ideas. We gather not only ideas of individuals (i.e. Peter), but also general ones (i.e. man). Some ideas are formed from symbols, from our having read or heard certain words. They are confused and unsystematic. They are called opinion or imagination. There are also ideas which represent adequately the properties of things. Adequate ideas are linked by logical connections to each other, forming a system of necessary truths. This is the second kind of knowledge, reason. The third kind of knowledge, intuition, is an immediate mental vision. It grasps the essences of things. Ideas are never false. To avoid error, suspend judgment.
Metaphysics Substances require nothing but itself in order to exist. There is only a single substance, which may be called either God or Nature which possesses both the
attribute of thought and extension. A substance is necessarily infinite. God is the only substance. Mind and matter are attributes of God, individual minds and bodies are modes.
Mind and Soul He did not believe that the intellect and the will were distinct from each other. Did not believe that human beings enjoy the degree of freedom Descartes attributed to them. Unlike Descartes, he believed that the human mind and body do not belong in two different worlds. Mind and body are inseparable: the human mind is simply the idea of the human body.
Ethics Primary motive of human action is self-preservation. Avoid being enslaved by passions, rather have an intellectual understanding of them replacing passive emotions with active ones is the path to liberation. All the complex passions (i.e. love, hatred, etc.) of humans are derived from the basic passions of desire, pleasure and pain 1) Passive passions are generated by external forces. 2) Active passions arise from the minds own understanding of the human condition. The intellectual love of God is the highest human activity.
God Ontological arguments: 1) God, a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses and eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists. 2) If you deny this, conceive, if you can, that God does not exist. Therefore his essence does not involve existence. But this is absurd. Therefore, God necessarily exists. Believed that the properties of God belong to traditional theism (i.e. God is infinite, simple, omnipotent, omniscient, etc.). God is something bodily. He is not a creator. God is everything and everything is God (pantheism).
Critique He somehow diminished the notion of human free will since, according to him, everything in the world is determined - we act according to the essence and attributes of God. If the mind is only the idea of the body, why and how are we therefore capable of apprehending, judging and reasoning (functions of the mind)? It seems that his notion of God (pantheism) goes back to the Medieval conception of God, especially to that of Saints Francis and Bonaventure. Spinozas reduction of God into a mere substance is absurd! How can God, a perfect spiritual being, be a composite body? He, as a last resort, attributed everything to God: nothing can exist nor be conceived without God.
