Historical figure · Pearson Edexcel International GCSE revision on Incandio

Baruch Spinoza

Portrait of Baruch Spinoza

Who Was Cast Out and Kept Working · Philosopher & Lens-Grinder · 1632 – 1677

The Amsterdam philosopher expelled from his own community at twenty-three, who ground optical lenses for a living, refused a professor's chair to keep his freedom, and argued that free will is ignorance of causes.

Defend these ideas against Spinoza

Incandio is a free revision platform for the Pearson Edexcel International GCSE, and on it a topic counts as mastered only once you have learned it, proved it in questions, taught it back and defended it against the person with the strongest claim on it. Baruch Spinoza is that person for 4 topics on the course:

Who was Spinoza?

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 into a family of Portuguese Jewish merchants who had fled the Inquisition. He was educated in the community's school, learned Hebrew and the commentators, and took over the family business on his father's death. In July 1656, when he was twenty-three, the Amsterdam congregation issued a cherem against him in the harshest language it ever used, and the document does not say what he had said to deserve it. He never sought readmission and never converted to anything else. He changed his name to Benedict, learned lens-grinding, and lived on it — first at Rijnsburg, then at Voorburg, then at The Hague — refusing the offers that would have made him comfortable, including a chair at Heidelberg in 1673, on the ground that a salary carries conditions. He published almost nothing under his own name. The Theological-Political Treatise appeared anonymously in 1670 with a false imprint, argued that the Bible must be read as a historical document written by human beings in particular circumstances, and was banned; it was described by one contemporary as forged in hell. The Ethics, his major work, is written in the form of a geometry — definitions, axioms, propositions, proofs — and was held back and published only after he died. Its argument is that there is one substance, which may be called God or Nature; that everything follows from it by necessity; and that human freedom as ordinarily imagined does not exist. Men think themselves free, he wrote, only because they are conscious of their volitions and ignorant of the causes that determine them; a stone in mid-air, if it were conscious, would believe it was flying of its own accord. He drew a further conclusion that most determinists avoid: understanding why a person acted removes hatred without removing the need to restrain them. He died at The Hague in 1677, at forty-four, probably of a lung disease made worse by glass dust.

Major achievements

Life in brief

Explore the life of Spinoza — five chapters

  1. A Merchant's Son in Amsterdam — Portuguese exiles, and a very good school
  2. The Cherem — July 1656, and words the community used only once
  3. The Lens Bench — A trade chosen, and a chair refused
  4. A Book Forged in Hell — The Treatise of 1670, and reading scripture as a document
  5. The Stone That Thinks It Flies — The Ethics, written like a geometry

Read the five-chapter life of Baruch Spinoza →

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