Baruch de Spinoza

Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza was born in 1632 in Amsterdam to a family of Portuguese-Jewish merchants who had fled the Inquisition. He received a traditional Jewish education but was drawn increasingly to the new philosophy of Descartes and to heterodox biblical criticism. In 1656, at the age of twenty-three, he was excommunicated from the Jewish community with extraordinary severity—the cherem pronounced against him was one of the harshest in the community's history. He spent the rest of his life in quiet independence, earning a modest living as a lens grinder while devoting himself to philosophical work. He refused a professorship at Heidelberg to preserve his intellectual freedom. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by Ethics.