Baruch Spinoza

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Theologico-Political Treatise is the only work of Baruch Spinoza's original philosophy published during his lifetime. The work has three purposes: to defend and bolster religious tolerance, to make a plea for freedom of thought and democracy, and to offer a new approach to the study and interpretation of the Bible and to its political uses. Despite the author's attempt...

Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher, one of the great rationalists and philosophers of the 17th century within the so-called Modern Philosophy, alongside René Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz. Spinoza believed that God was the mechanism that moved the Universe, and that the biblical texts were nothing more than symbols that dispense with any rational approach. According to his view, the texts contained therein do not translate the reality that...

El pensador que mejor supo unir racionalidad y alegría ética-Tratado teológico político-Tratado político. Sostuvo que el sabio es alegre por definición y se opone siempre a la tristeza, y que sin alegría el pensamiento es menos productivo y creador. Tan lejos del optimismo ingenuo como del pesimismo moral e ideológico, su objetivo fue comprender en vez de juzgar. Serenidad, cautela y honestidad fueron los valores que sustentaron la vida y...

The seventeenth century Dutch philosopher views the ability to experience rational love of God as the key to mastering the contradictory and violent human emotions.

Widely accepted as a philosophical masterpiece, Ethics sets out to explain nothing less than the nature of God, the world, and how we should live. Rejecting some of the most deeply held presuppositions of classical and medieval thought, Spinoza makes the radical claim that God and the universe are in fact one and the same, a single substance with infinite attributes. Ethics is famously complex, its elaborate and self-referential matrix of definitions...