Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza
Born	(1632-11-24)24 November 1632 Amsterdam, Dutch Republic
Died	21 February 1677(1677-02-21) (aged 44) The Hague, Dutch Republic
Residence	Netherlands
Education	Talmud Torah of Amsterdam (withdrew)
Alma mater	University of Leiden (no degree)
Era	17th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Rationalism, founder of Spinozism
Main interests	Ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, Hebrew grammar
Notable ideas	Pantheism, determinism, neutral monism, parallelism, intellectual and religious freedom, separation of church and state, criticism of Mosaic authorship of some books of the Hebrew Bible, political society as derived from power (not contract), affect, natura naturans/natura naturata
Influences Descartes, Stoics, Maimonides, Abraham ibn Ezra, Avicenna, Averroes,Aristotle, Democritus, Lucretius, Epicurus, Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Giordano Bruno, Franciscus van den Enden, Menasseh Ben Israel
Influenced Hegel, Kant, Rousseau, Næss, Marx,G. Wagner, Davidson, Deleuze, Einstein, George Eliot, Fichte, Novalis, Leibniz, Goethe,Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Freud, Althusser, Hardt, Negri, Santayana, Coleridge, L. Strauss, Kołakowski

Baruch Spinoza (/bəˈruːk spɪˈnoʊzə/;Dutch: [baːˈrux spɪˈnoːzaː]; born Benedito de Espinosa, Portuguese: [bɨnɨˈðitu ðɨ ʃpiˈnɔzɐ]; 24 November 1632 – 21 February 1677, later Benedict de Spinoza) was a Dutch philosopher of Sephardi/Portuguese origin. By laying the groundwork for the 18th-century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism, including modern conceptions of the self and the universe, he came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy.

Spinoza's magnum opus, Ethics, was published posthumously in 1677. The work opposed René Descartes' philosophy on mind–body dualism, and earned Spinoza recognition as one of Western philosophy's most important thinkers. In the Ethics, "Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely."Hegel said, "You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all." His philosophical accomplishments and moral character prompted 20th-century philosopher Gilles Deleuze to name him "the 'prince' of philosophers".