Baruch Spinoza

It was after he had adopted his Latin name and started teaching at a school that he first felt romantically towards a fellow teacher’s daughter, Clara. However, the love was one-sided as she rejected him for someone who was richer and affluent

His health started deteriorating in 1676 and by the following year, it worsened. On February 20, 1677, he breathed his last due to lung illness which resulted from breathing dust from lens grinding. He was laid to rest in the churchyard of the Christian Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague

As stated in his will, ‘The Ethics’ was published posthumously in 1677, along with his other works. It was mainly divided into five parts, Concerning God, The Nature and Origin of the Human Mind, The Nature and Origin of the Emotions, Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions and The Power of the Understanding, or Human Freedom.

Baruch de Spinoza was the second son born to the couple, Miguel de Espinoza and Ana D�bora in Amsterdam. His father was a successful Portuguese Sephardic Jewish merchant. His mother passed away when he was six years of age.

Young Spinoza was proficient in many languages namely, Portuguese, Hebrew, Spanish, Dutch, French and Latin. Raised in a traditional Jewish household, he attained his preliminary education from Keter Torah yeshiva.

Taught by both conventional and progressive-minded teachers, he achieved the best of both the line of thoughts. He was a brilliant student, with the capabilities of becoming a rabbi. However, the ill-timed and unfortunate death of his elder brother led him to give up education and instead get involved in family business in 1650.

In 1653, he began studying Latin with Frances van den Enden. Frances was a free-thinker, who introduced the former to a new line of thought, opening up windows of scholastic and modern philosophy for him.

Upon the death of his father in 1654, he dedicated eleven months in reciting Kaddish or the Jewish prayer of mourning. He refused the inheritance and instead passed on everything to his sister Rebekah.

For a short time, he ran the family importing business which faced immense financial crisis during the First Anglo Dutch War. In order to free himself from the creditors, he declared himself an orphan and relinquished from the duties of the business.

He then inherited his mother’s estate and switched to devoting himself completely to philosophy and optics.

He adopted the Latin name, Benedictus de Spinoza and started working as a teacher. This was an important phase in his life as he was exposed to rationalism by the anti-clerical sect of Remonstrants.

This Dutch philosopher was a radical thinker, whose posthumously published work, ‘The Ethics’ made him one of the greatest revolutionary and rational thinkers of the 17th century philosophy.