Renaissance/Early Modern
Baruch Spinoza
1632–1677
“By God, I mean a being absolutely infinite—that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality.”
Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish descent who ground lenses and published little under his own name in his lifetime. The proceeds in geometric order from definitions and axioms to a single substance, God or Nature, of which mind and body are attributes and finite things are modes. Freedom, on his account, is understanding necessity. There is no separate creator standing outside the world he makes. Later metaphysics and theology had either to accept monism or to show where the argument fails.
In the Conversation
16 of the Great Ideas
Ethics
Love
The intellectual love of God is the mind's highest joy, and God's own love of himself through us.
Courage
Courage is rational strength of mind — the desire that reason alone produces to preserve one's being — and knowing when to yield is as much a mark of it as knowing when to fight.
Desire
Desire is the very essence of a human being: the striving by which each thing persists in its own being.
Emotion
An affect is a confused idea; the mind's power over the passions comes from adequate knowledge, not willpower.
Theology & Metaphysics
Being
There is only one substance (God or Nature), and everything else is a mode of it.
Cause
Everything follows from God by necessity; causation is identical with logical consequence.
Metaphysics
There is only one substance, God or Nature, and all particular things are its modes; metaphysics is the geometrical science of this single reality.
Metaphysics
Chance
In nature there is nothing contingent; chance is only the name for our ignorance of the order of causes.
Necessity and Contingency
Nothing is contingent: everything that exists follows from the necessity of the divine nature.
One and Many
There is only one substance, infinite and indivisible; every finite thing is a mode of it.