Baruch Spinoza – Founder of the Spinozistic or Naturalistic School of Philosophy
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Baruch Spinoza, the founder of the Spinozistic or Naturalistic School of philosophy was born on November 24, 1632 in Amsterdam, Dutch Republic. He was the son of Ana Debora who died when he was six years old and Miguel Spinoza. Miguel was a successful importer/merchant. Their families were of Jewish descent. Miguels families originated in Spain, but were forced into the Catholic religion. Miguels father Isaac took his family to France; they were banned and later moved to Rotterdam, where Isaac dies in 1627. Baruchs father along with his brothers later moved to Amsterdam to reassume their Judaism.
Baruch had a traditional Jewish childhood upbringing and attended Talmud Torah School. He was very gifted and was being groomed for a career as a rabbi. Baruch never made it to the upper levels of the curriculum, including the advanced study of Talmud. When he was seventeen he was forced to stop his studies to help run his familys importing business.
Spinozas early works were strongly on denying the immortality of the soul and rejecting the notion of an identical God. He claimed that the Law was neither literally given by God nor any longer binding Jews. Spinoza was content finally to have an excuse from leaving from the community and leaving Judaism behind. From that moment on his religious commitment was no longer.
In 1661 Spinoza leaves to Rijnsburg and worked on “Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect” an essay on philosophical method. Also “Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being” on his metaphysical, epistemological and moral views. In1633 he wrote a critical exposition of Descartes “Principles of Philosophy, the only work he published under his own name in his lifetime.
One of the branches in Spinozas philosophy was based on his work in Ethics. From the category of ethics he branches out his ideas of God and Nature, Knowledge, Passion & Action and Virtue & Happiness. In his God or Nature theory he is debating the strength of both worlds. “By attribute I understand what the intellect perceives of a substance, as constituting its essence.” “By God I understand a being absolutely infinite.” -Baruch Spinoza. He also focuses on the origin and nature of the human being. Where he studies the human mind (knowledge) and how we process ideas. He classifies these ideas as sensory images, qualitative ideas and perceptual data. His definition for them was the “imprecise qualitative phenomena, being the expression in thought of states of the body as it is affected by the bodies surrounding it.”
Passion and Action is all about human behaviors and emotions. He describes how the affects of our human emotions are split into passion and action. Our love, anger, hate, envy, pride, jealousy, etc.–“follow from the same necessity and force of nature as the other singular things”. Spinoza expressed our