Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin. His Ethics, written in geometric form, presents a radical metaphysical system where God and Nature are one and the same substance.

Excommunicated from his Jewish community for his unorthodox views, Spinoza argued for a deterministic universe and developed one of the earliest modern critiques of the Bible. His pantheistic philosophy influenced Romanticism, German Idealism, and modern thought.