Spinoza's Ethics: Substance, God, and Nature

Baruch (Benedictus) Spinoza (1632–1677), born in Amsterdam to a family of Portuguese Jewish descent, was formally expelled from the Amsterdam Sephardic community by a writ of cherem (excommunication) issued on 27 July 1656, for what the surviving document calls "abominable heresies" and "monstrous deeds," though it specifies no doctrinal content. Spinoza's masterwork, the Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (Ethica, Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata), was completed by 1675 but published only posthumously in 1677, in the Opera Posthuma assembled by his friends, after Spinoza's death from a lung ailment, likely aggravated by his work grinding optical lenses, on 21 February 1677 at The Hague. The book is organized, as its title announces, in the manner of Euclid's Elements: definitions and axioms open each of its five parts, from which propositions are formally demonstrated, each accompanied by proofs, corollaries, and often discursive scholia in which Spinoza addresses implications and likely objections in a more conversational register.