A news site that explores the edges of science altered realities, neardeath experiences, unsolved mysteries, exotic sushi, parallel universes, religion and science. Brief Biosketch. Adele Diamond is the Canada Research Chair Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Yahoo Lifestyle is your source for style, beauty, and wellness, including health, inspiring stories, and the latest fashion trends. Baruch Spinoza Wikipedia. Baruch Spinoza. Born1. November 1. 63. 2Amsterdam, Dutch Republic. Died. 21 February 1. The Hague, Dutch Republic. Residence. Netherlands. Education. Talmud Torah of Amsterdam1withdrew2Alma mater. University of Leidenno degree3Era. 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 naturansnatura naturata. Influences. Descartes, Stoics, Maimonides, Abraham ibn Ezra, Avicenna, Averroes,4Aristotle, Democritus, Lucretius, Epicurus, Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Giordano Bruno, Franciscus van den Enden, Menasseh Ben Israel. Influenced. Enlightenment philosophy Age of Reason, German Idealism, Jorge Luis Borges, Hegel, Rousseau, Nss, Marx,5G. Wagner, Davidson, Deleuze, Einstein, George Eliot, Fichte, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Novalis, Leibniz, Goethe,5Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Freud, Althusser, tienne Balibar, Hardt, Evald Ilyenkov, Negri, Santayana, Coleridge, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, L. Strauss, Koakowski. Baruch Spinoza 6Dutch barux spnoza born Benedito de Espinosa, Portuguese bnitu pinz 2. November 1. 63. 2 2. February 1. 67. 7, later Benedict de Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher of SephardiPortuguese origin. 5 By laying the groundwork for the 1. Enlightenment7 and modern biblical criticism,8 including modern conceptions of the self and the universe,9 he came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 1. Along with Ren Descartes, Spinoza was a leading philosophical figure of the Dutch Golden Age. Spinozas given name, which means Blessed, varies among different languages. Around this time last year, my mom passed away. I was in charge of planning her funeral and burial arrangements, dealing with her stuff, and pretty much all the other. In Hebrew, it is written. His Portuguese name is Benedito Bento de Espinosa. In his Latin works, he used Latin Benedictus de Spinoza. Spinozas magnum opus, Ethics, was published posthumously in 1. The work opposed Descartes philosophy on mindbody dualism, and earned Spinoza recognition as one of Western philosophys 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. 1. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said, You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all. 1. His philosophical accomplishments and moral character prompted philosopher Gilles Deleuze to name him the prince of philosophers. 1. Spinoza was raised in a Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. He developed highly controversial ideas regarding the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the nature of the Divine. Jewish religious authorities issued a herem against him, causing him to be effectively shunned by Jewish society at age 2. His books were also later put on the Catholic Churchs Index of Forbidden Books. Spinoza lived an outwardly simple life as a lens grinder, turning down rewards and honours throughout his life, including prestigious teaching positions. He died at the age of 4. He is buried in the churchyard of the Christian Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague. 1. BiographyeditFamily and community originseditSpinozas ancestors were of Sephardic Jewish descent and were a part of the community of Portuguese Jews that had settled in the city of Amsterdam in the wake of the Portuguese Inquisition 1. Iberian peninsula. 1. The Spinoza family de Espinosa or Espinosa in Portuguese and in Spanish it could also be spelled as de Espinoza or Espinoza in both languages probably had its origins in Espinosa de los Monteros, near Burgos, or in Espinosa de Cerrato, near Palencia, both in Northern Castile, Spain. The family was expelled from Spain in 1. Portugal. Portugal compelled them to convert to Catholicism in 1. Attracted by the Decree of Toleration issued in 1. Union of Utrecht, Portuguese conversos first sailed to Amsterdam in 1. Judaism. 1. 8 In 1. Jews was passed. 1. As a community of exiles, the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam were highly proud of their identity. 1. Spinozas father was born roughly a century after this forced conversion in the small Portuguese city of Vidigueira, near Beja in Alentejo. When Spinozas father was still a child, Spinozas grandfather, Isaac de Spinoza, who was from Lisbon, took his family to Nantes in France. They were expelled in 1. Rotterdam, where Isaac died in 1. Spinozas father, Miguel Michael, and his uncle, Manuel, then moved to Amsterdam where they resumed the practice of Judaism. Miguel was a successful merchant and became a warden of the synagogue and of the Amsterdam Jewish school. 1. He buried three wives and three of his six children died before reaching adulthood. 2. NetherlandseditAmsterdam and Rotterdam operated as important cosmopolitan centres where merchant ships from many parts of the world brought people of various customs and beliefs. This flourishing commercial activity encouraged a culture relatively tolerant of the play of new ideas, to a considerable degree sheltered from the censorious hand of ecclesiastical authority though those considered to have gone too far might have gotten persecuted even in the Netherlands. Not by chance were the philosophical works of both Descartes and Spinoza developed in the cultural and intellectual background of the Dutch Republic in the 1. Spinoza may have had access to a circle of friends who were unconventional in terms of social tradition, including members of the Collegiants. 2. One of the people he knew was Niels Stensen, a brilliant Danish student in Leiden 2. Albert Burgh, with whom Spinoza is known to have corresponded. 2. Early lifeedit. Map by Balthasar Florisz van Berckenrode 1. Moses and Aaron church in white, but also the spot where Spinoza grew up. 2. Benedito de Espinoza was born on 2. November 1. 63. 2 in the Jodenbuurt in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He was the second son of Miguel de Espinoza, a successful, although not wealthy, Portuguese Sephardic Jewish merchant in Amsterdam. 2. His mother, Ana Dbora, Miguels second wife, died when Baruch was only six years old. 2. Spinozas mother tongue was Portuguese, although he also knew Hebrew, Spanish, Dutch, perhaps French, and later Latin. 2. Although he wrote in Latin, Spinoza learned the language only late in his youth. Spinoza had a traditional Jewish upbringing, attending the Keter Torah yeshiva of the Amsterdam Talmud Torah congregation headed by the learned and traditional senior Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira. His teachers also included the less traditional Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel, a man of wide learning and secular interests, a friend of Vossius, Grotius, and Rembrandt. 3. While presumably a star pupil, and perhaps considered as a potential rabbi, Spinoza never reached the advanced study of the Torah in the upper levels of the curriculum. 3. Instead, at the age of 1. Isaac, he cut short his formal studies in order to begin working in the family importing business. 3. In 1. 65. 3, at age 2. Spinoza began studying Latin with Francis van den Enden Franciscus van den Enden, a notorious free thinker, former Jesuit, and radical democrat who likely introduced Spinoza to scholastic and modern philosophy, including that of Descartes. 3. A decade later, in the early 1.