Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
One of the most original and penetrating philosophers of all time, Spinoza is also one of the clearest and easiest to understand. In The Ethics, sometimes viewed structurally as an attempt to apply the methods of Euclid to philosophy, Spinoza develops a far-reaching deductive system based on his conception of all existence as a vast unity and on psychological insights of great depth.
Synopsis
What does it mean to live an ethical life? For seventeenth-century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza, this question led to a doctrine in which God is present in all things and the human mind is part of God's infinite intellect. Spinoza regarded ethics as a rational system corresponding to the rational nature of the universe and employed a deductive method derived from Euclidean geometry to show that the validity of ethical ideas can be demonstrated by a mathematical style argument. His conclusion: to be guided by reason is to live freely, motivated by love and goodwill rather than fear or hatred.
These ideas challenged both conventional views of God and the related social and political structure. Reviled by the religious authorities of his native Amsterdam, Spinoza remained an uncompromising model of intellectual courage. His vision, published posthumously as The Ethics, has served as an inspiration to Enlightenment philosophers, Romantic poets, and generations of thinkers.