Spinoza, Atheist is a 2023 book by Steven Nadler in which he argues that Baruch Spinoza was an atheist; that his philosophy was a form of pantheism; that God does not exist; that what we call God is ...

What is Spinoza’s Philosophy? Ian Buruma’s 2024 “Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah,” a significant addition to Jewish studies, is published by Yale University Press. This book is a comprehensive introduction ...

In Part 3 of this series, I will focus on the aftermath of Salomon’s rebellion, and on his granddaughter Olga. I have been ...

In the beginning was Uriel da Costa. Then came Baruch Spinoza. A mercurial recusant born in 1585 in Porto, Portugal, da Costa was a Catholic scion of prosperous Portuguese crypto-Jewish Conversos who ...

A brisk and engaging biography of Baruch Spinoza, the man who inspired many secular Jewish thinkers, is least convincing when it offers him as an example of ‘cancel culture’ In December 2021, the ...

Here are the opening lines of the herem, the philosopher Spinoza’s excommunication from the Amsterdam synagogue. With the judgment of the angels and with that of the saints, we put under herem, ...

Jewish Lights Publishing, 224 pages, $24.99. What does a 12th-century rabbi in Egypt, arguably the greatest thinker in Jewish history, have in common with a 17th-century Jewish philosopher in ...

In March, 1668, Adriaan Koerbagh, a Dutch physician in his mid-thirties, hired Johannes Van Eede, a printer in Utrecht, to publish his new book, “A Light Shining in Dark Places, to Shed Light on ...

In the third book of the Ethics, Spinoza writes that he intends to consider human emotions "as if the surfaces of lines, planes or solids". Because the emotions are just as natural and as law-governed ...

40 pages into Ian Buruma’s fascinating biography of the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, some very modern language leaps from the page. “When people are banished from their community,” Buruma ...

The beguiling Dutch philosopher’s life and work is prone to misunderstandings and misreadings. A recent biography goes so far as to recruit him into the culture war. Ad Policy A portrait of Benedict ...