Yamile Rojas PHIL 1000-022 Alexander Izrailevsky November 26, 2013

BARUCH SPINOZA

Later Benedict Spinoza, ((in Hebrew, Baruch; in Latin, Benedictus), was a Dutch philosopher, born November 24, 1632, Amsterdam, Netherlands, died in February 21, 1677, The Hague, Netherlands, his siblings Gabriel Spinoza, Rebekah Spinoza, Isaac Spinoza; and his parents Miguel Spinoza, Ana Dbora Spinoza. Hi was a middle son in a prominent family Amsterdams Portuguese Jewish community. As a boy, Spinoza has been one of the star pupils in the congregations Talmud Torah School. He was intellectually gift. As He made progress through his studies, Spinoza was being groomed for a career as rabbi. But he never made it into upper levels of the curriculum. At the age of seventeen he was force to cut his studies to help his familys importing business.

One of the most important philosophers and one of the most radical of the early modern, Spinoza was issued the toughest court order of Hebrew, or excommunication, it was never rescinded. Spinoza denies the immorality of the soul, strongly rejects the notion of a providential God the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; claim that the law neither literally given by God nor any longer obligatory on Jews. He was sanctioned by an Orthodox Jewish Community.

Finally, he had an excuse for departing from the community and leaving Judaism behind, his faith and religious commitment were by this point gone. Within a few years he left Amsterdam. By the time his existent correspondence begins, he is living in Rijnsburg close to Leiden. While in Rijnsburg, he was worked on the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, an essay on philosophical method, and the Short Treatise on God, Man and his well being an initial but aborted effort to lay out his metaphysical, epistemological and moral views. (Nadler)

His Critical exposition of Descartess Principles of Philosophy, the only work he published under his own name during his life. After he had moved to Voorburg, outside of Hague, he was also working on what would eventually called the Ethics, his philosophical masterpiece.

When he saw the principles of tolerance in Holland being threatened by reactionary forces, he put it away to complete his immoral Theological-political Treatise, published anonymously in 1670. When Spinoza died in 1677, he was still at work on his political Treatise; this was sooner published by his friends along with his other unpublished writings, including a Compendium to Hebrew grammar.

EPISTEMOLOGY OF SPINOZA His extremely naturalistic views of God, the world, the human being, and the knowledge, his thought combines to a number of Cartesian metaphysical and epistemological principles with elements from ancient Stoicism and medieval Jewish rationalism into a nonetheless highly original system. (Nadler) 1. ETHICS 1. What Spinoza intends to demonstrate is the truth about God, nature and especially ourselves and the highest principles of society, religion and the good life.

2. Despite the great deal of metaphysics, physics, anthropology and psychology, Spinoza took the crucial message of the work to be ethical and nature. It consist in showing our happiness and well been lie not in a life enslaved to the passions and the transitory goods we ordinarily pursue, nor the attachment to the superstition that pass as religion, but rather in the life of reason. 3. To clarify and support these ethical conclusions, Spinoza first demystified the universe and showed it as it really is. This requires laying out some metaphysical foundations, his project in part one. 2. GOD AND NATURE Spinoza presents the basic elements of his picture of God. God is the infinite, necessarily existing (that is, uncaused), unique substance of the universe. There is only one substance in the universe; it is God; and everything else that is, is in God. 1. A substance is prior in nature to its affections. 2. Two substances having different attributes have nothing in common with one another. (In other words, if two substances differ in nature, then they have nothing in common).

3. If things have nothing in common with one another, one of them cannot be the cause of the other. 4. Two or more distinct things are distinguished from one another, either by a difference in the attributes i.e., the natures or essences of the substances or by a difference in their affections i.e., their accidental properties. 5. In nature, there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute. 6. One substance cannot be produced by another substance. 7. It pertains to the nature of a substance to exist. 8. Every substance is necessarily infinite. 9. The more reality or being each thing has, the more attributes belong to it. 10. Each attribute of a substance must be conceived through itself.

11. God or a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists. (The proof of this proposition consists simply in the classic ontological proof for God's existence. Spinoza writes that if you deny this, conceive, if you can, that God does not exist. Therefore, by axiom 7 [If a thing can be conceived as not existing, its essence does not involve existence], his essence does not involve existence. But this, by proposition 7, is absurd. Therefore, God necessarily exists, i.e.) 12. No attribute of a substance can be truly conceived from which it follows that the substance can be divided. 13. A substance which is absolutely infinite is indivisible. 14. Except God, no substance can be or be conceived.

3. THE HUMAN BEING 1. God is indeed material, even matter itself, but this does not imply that God has a body.

2. Every bodily event is part of an infinite causal series of bodily events and is determined only by the nature of extension and its laws, in conjunction with its relations to other extended bodies. 3. Similarly, every idea follows only from the attribute of thought. Any idea is an integral part of an infinite series of ideas and is determined by the nature of thought and its laws, along with its relations to other ideas. There is, in other words, no causal interaction between bodies and ideas, between the physical and the mental. 4. A circle existing in nature and the idea of the existing circle, which is also in God, are one and the same thing, which is explained through different attributes. 5. The most celebrated legacy of Descartes's dualism, is the problem of how two radically different substances such as mind and body enter into a union in a human being and cause effects in each other. 6. How can the extended body causally engage the unextended mind, which is incapable of contact or motion, and move it, that is, cause mental effects such as pains, sensations and perceptions.

7. Spinoza, in effect, denies that the human being is a union of two substances. The human mind and the human body are two different expressions. And because there is no causal interaction between the mind and the body, the so-called mind-body problem does not, technically speaking, arise. 4. KNOWLEDGE 1. The human mind, like God, contains ideas. 2. Some of these ideassensory images, qualitative feels (like pains and pleasures), perceptual dataare imprecise qualitative phenomena, being the expression in thought of states of the body as it is affected by the bodies surrounding it. 3. There is no systematic order to these perceptions, nor any critical oversight by reason. 4. This superficial acquaintance will never provide us with knowledge of the essences of those things. In fact, it is an invariable source of falsehood and error. 5. Adequate ideas, on the other hand, are formed in a rational and orderly manner, and are necessarily true and revelatory of the essences of things. Reason, the second kind of knowledge (after random experience), is the apprehension of the essence of a thing through a broad, inferential procedure.

CONCLUSION

In my humble opinion, I consider Spinozas philosophy as a one of the toughest to understand but at the same time, he was clear in his explanation with the connection of human beings, with the universe, the human being with the ethic as well as his concept of god and society as a whole. Associating his philosophy with David Humes philosophy- Empiricism- human knowledge is based on sensations, sensual information, Spinozas in his philosophy said that human mind contain ideas, and some of these ideas are sensory images like pain and pleaser One could say that Spinoza experience is an experience of God while for Kant no experience exists. The Ethics and critic of pure reason have different views of God in sketchily different metaphysics. They also have some similarities like in science Spinoza and Kants metaphysics relate the problem of free will, and how then is affected the function and nature of God in their system. If Spinoza seems close to atheism, Kant threatened Gods existence and our ability to know him. One could conclude their both ideas are fundamentally incompatibles. (Curley)

CITATION Nadler, Steven, "Baruch Spinoza", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), This entry was first published on Fri Jun 29, 2001. It was last Spinoza, B., Ethics, ed. trans. E. Curley, (London 1996)

http://writingsonthewall.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/essays/k-and-s.pdfmodified on Jul 15, Spinoza, B., Ethics, ed. trans. E. Curley, (London 1996)2013.