Baruch Spinoza: Early Explorations and Ethics

This is a course on Baruch Spinoza, a Jewish philosopher who lived in Holland from 1632 to 1677.  Expelled from the synagogue because of his rejection of the Mosaic authorship of the Torah, he lived the life of a solitary scholar.  He was influenced chiefly by Descartes, but also by the ancient Stoics, Moses Maimonides, and Thomas Hobbes.  Most of his writings were published after his death.  He was centuries ahead of his time in his scholarly approach to the Bible.  He was a passionate defender of a political order which would secure individual freedoms (such as his own heretical views on religion).  But by far his most valuable contribution to Western philosophy was his work Ethics, in which he saves Cartesian dualism by subsuming it into a monistic, pantheistic metaphysics.  In the first half of the course, we will examine his three early philosophical explorations and then move on to his more mature theological and political investigations.  The second half of the course will focus entirely on the Ethics.