Fondazione corrente spinoza biography

Celebrated as one of the most original and influential thinkers of the seventeenth century, Rebecca Goldstein dubbed him "the renegade Jew who gave us modernity. Spinoza's ancestors, adherents of Crypto-Judaismfaced persecution during the Portuguese Inquisitionenduring torture and public displays of humiliation. Inhis paternal grandfather's family left Vidigueira for Nantes and lived outwardly as New Christians[ 25 ] eventually transferring to Holland for an unknown reason.

Spinoza's father Michael was a prominent and wealthy merchant in Amsterdam with a business that had wide geographical reach. After the death of Rachel, Michael married Hannah Deborah, with whom he had five children. His second wife brought a dowry to the marriage that was absorbed into Michael's business capital instead of being set aside for her children, which may have caused a grudge between Spinoza and his father.

The family lived close to the Bet Ya'acov synagogue, and nearby were Christians, including the artist Rembrandt. Spinoza's younger brother Gabriel was born infollowed by another sister Rebecca. Miriam married Samuel de Caceres but died shortly after childbirth. According to Jewish practice, Samuel had to marry his former sister-in-law Rebecca.

Michael's third wife, Esther, raised Spinoza from age nine; she lacked formal Jewish knowledge due to growing up a New Christian and only spoke Portuguese at home. The marriage was childless. Through his mother, Spinoza was related to the philosopher Uriel da Costawho stirred controversy in Amsterdam's Portuguese Jewish community. His clashes with the religious establishment led to his excommunication twice by rabbinic authorities, who imposed humiliation and social exclusion.

He died inreportedly committing suicide. During his childhood, Spinoza was likely unaware of his family connection with Uriel da Costa; still, as a teenager, he certainly heard discussions about him. Amsterdam's Jewish communities long remembered and discussed da Costa's skepticism about organized religion, denial of the soul's immortality, and the idea that Moses didn't write the Torah, influencing Spinoza's intellectual journey.

Spinoza attended the Talmud Torah school adjoining the Bet Ya'acov synagogue, a few doors down from his home, headed by the senior Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira. Spinoza possibly went to work around fourteen and almost certainly was needed in his father's business after his brother died in During the First Anglo-Dutch Warmuch of the Spinoza firm's ships and cargo were captured by English ships, severely affecting the firm's financial viability.

The firm was saddled with debt by the war's end in due to its merchant voyages being intercepted by the English, leading to its decline. In MarchSpinoza went to the city authorities for protection against debts in the Portuguese Jewish community. To free himself from the responsibility of paying debts owed by his late father, Spinoza appealed to the city to declare him an orphan; [ 53 ] since he was a legal minor, not understanding his father's indebtedness would remove the obligation to repay his debts and retrospectively renounce his inheritance.

Amsterdam was tolerant of religious diversity so long as it was practiced discreetly. The community was concerned with protecting its reputation and not associating with Spinoza lest his controversial views provide the basis for possible persecution or expulsion. On 27 July,the Talmud Torah community leaders, which included Aboab de Fonseca[ 57 ] issued a writ of herem against the year-old Spinoza.

Before the expulsion, Spinoza had not published anything or written a treatise; Steven Nadler states that if Spinoza was voicing his criticism of Judaism that later appeared through his philosophical works, such as Part I of Ethicsthen there can be no wonder that he was severely punished. After the censure, Spinoza may have written an Apologia in Spanish defending his views, but it is now lost.

Sometime between andSpinoza started studying Latin with political radical Franciscus van den Endena former Jesuit and atheist, who likely introduced Spinoza to scholastic and modern philosophy, including Descartes, who had a fondazione corrente spinoza biography influence on Spinoza's philosophy. After learning Latin with Van Enden, Spinoza studied at Leiden University around[ 77 ] where he audited classes in Cartesian philosophy.

Between andSpinoza moved from Amsterdam to Rijnsburgallowing for a quiet retreat in the country and access to the university town, Leiden, where he still had many friends. Spinoza's explanations of essential elements of the Cartesian system helped many interested people study the system, enhancing his philosophical reputation. This work was published in and was one of the two works published in his lifetime under his name.

Fondazione corrente spinoza biography: In quest'opera, Huet reinterpreta il

InSpinoza moved to Voorburg for an unknown reason. He continued working on Ethics and corresponded with scientists and philosophers throughout Europe. In[ 92 ] he began writing the Theological-Political Treatisewhich addresses theological and political issues such as the interpretation of scripture, the origins of the state, and the bounds of political and religious authority while arguing for a secular, democratic state.

Anticipating the reaction to his ideas, Spinoza published his treatise in under a false publisher and a fictitious place of publication. InSpinoza moved to The Hague to have easier access to the city's intellectual life and to be closer to his friends and followers. He returned to the manuscript of Ethicsreworking part Three into parts Four and Five, and composed a Hebrew grammar for proper interpretation of scripture and for clearing up confusion and problems when studying the Bible, with part One presenting etymology, the alphabet, and principles governing nouns, verbs, and more.

Part Two, unfinished before he died, would have presented syntax rules. Few of Spinoza's letters are extant, and none before He acted as an intermediary for Spinoza's correspondence, sending and receiving letters of the philosopher to and from third parties. They maintained their relationship until Serrarius died in Through his pursuits in lens grinding, mathematics, optics, and philosophy, Spinoza forged connections with prominent figures such as scientist Christiaan Huygensmathematician Johannes Huddeand Secretary of the British Royal Society Henry Oldenburg.

Huygens and "fondazione corrente spinoza biographies" notably praised the quality of Spinoza's lenses. Whereas Blijenbergh deferred to the authority of scripture for theology and philosophy, Spinoza told him not solely to look at scripture for truth or anthropomorphize God. Also, Spinoza told him their views were incommensurable. Leibniz was concerned when his name was not redacted in a letter printed in the Opera Posthuma.

Burgh attacked Spinoza's views as expressed in the Theological-Political Treatise and tried to persuade Spinoza to embrace Catholicism. In response, Spinoza, at the request of Burgh's family, who hoped to restore his reason, wrote an angry letter mocking the Catholic Church and condemning all religious superstition. Spinoza published little in his lifetime, and most formal writings were in Latin, reaching few readers.

Apart from Descartes' Principles of Philosophy and the Theologico-Political Treatisehis works appeared in print after his death. Because the reaction to his anonymously published work, Theologico-Political Treatisewas unfavorable, Spinoza told supporters not to translate his works and abstained from publishing further. His posthumous works— Opera Posthuma —were edited by his friends in secrecy to prevent the confiscation and destruction of manuscripts.

Spinoza's health began to fail inand he died in The Hague on 21 February at age 44, attended by a physician friend, Georg Herman Schuller. Spinoza had been ill with some form of lung affliction, probably tuberculosis and possibly complicated by silicosis brought on by grinding glass lenses. Lutheran preacher Johannes Colerus wrote the first biography of Spinoza for the original reason of researching his final days.

Spinoza was buried inside the Nieuwe Kerk four days after his death, with six others in the same vault. At the time, there was no memorial plaque for Spinoza. In the 18th century, the vault was emptied, and the remnants scattered over the earth of the churchyard. The memorial plaque is outside the church, where some of his remains are part of the churchyard's soil.

His supporters took them away for safekeeping from seizure by those wishing to suppress his writings, and they do not appear in the inventory of his possessions at death. Within a year of his death, his supporters translated his Latin manuscripts into Dutch and other languages. Spinoza considered The Ethics his chief project and philosophical legacy.

The Ethicsa "superbly cryptic masterwork", contains many unresolved obscurities and is written with a forbidding mathematical structure modeled on Euclid's geometry. Following Descartes, Spinoza aimed to understand truth through logical deductions from 'clear and distinct ideas', a process which always begins from the 'self-evident truths' of axioms.

In this light, the Principles of Philosophy might be viewed as an "exercise in geometric method and philosophy", paving the way for numerous concepts and conclusions that would define his philosophy see Cogitata Metaphysica. Spinoza's metaphysics consists of one thing, substance, and its modifications modes. Early in The Ethics Spinoza argues that only one substance is absolutely infiniteself-caused, and eternal.

He calls this substance " God ", or " Nature ". He takes these two terms to be synonymous in the Latin the phrase he uses is "Deus sive Natura". For Spinoza, the whole of the natural universe consists of one substance, God, or, what is the same, Nature, and its modifications modes. It cannot be overemphasized how the rest of Spinoza's philosophy—his philosophy of mind, his epistemology, his psychology, his moral philosophy, his political philosophy, and his philosophy of religion—flows more or less directly from the metaphysical underpinnings in Part I of the Ethics.

Spinoza sets forth a vision of Being, illuminated by his awareness of God. They may seem strange at first sight. To the question "What is? Following MaimonidesSpinoza defined substance as "that which is in itself and is conceived through itself", meaning that it can be understood without any reference to anything external. Spinoza defined God as "a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence", and since "no cause or reason" can prevent such a being from existing, it must exist.

After stating his proof for God's existence, Spinoza addresses who "God" is. Spinoza believed that God is "the sum of the natural and physical laws of the universe and certainly not an individual entity or creator". Therefore, God is just the sum of all the substances of the universe. God is the only substance in the universe, and everything is a part of God.

This view was described by Charles Hartshorne as Classical Pantheism. Spinoza argues that "things could not have been produced by God in any other way or in any other order than is the case". Schuller Letter 58he wrote: "men are conscious of their desire and unaware of the causes by which [their desires] are determined. According to Eric Schliesser, Spinoza was skeptical regarding the possibility of knowledge of nature and as a consequence at odds with scientists such as Galileo and Huygens.

Although the principle of sufficient reason is commonly associated with Gottfried LeibnizSpinoza employs it in a more systematic manner. In Spinoza's philosophical framework, questions concerning why a particular phenomenon exists are always answerable, and these answers are provided in terms of the relevant cause. Spinoza's approach involves first providing an account of a phenomenon, such as goodness or consciousness, to explain it, and then further explaining the phenomenon in terms of itself.

For instance, he might argue that consciousness is the degree of power of a mental state. Spinoza has also been described as an " Epicurean materialist", [ ] specifically in reference to his opposition to Cartesian mind-body dualism. This view was held by Epicureans before him, as they believed that atoms with their probabilistic paths were the only substance that existed fundamentally.

One thing which seems, on the surface, to distinguish Spinoza's view of the emotions from both Descartes' and Hume's pictures of them is that he takes the emotions to be cognitive in some important respect. Jonathan Bennett claims that "Spinoza mainly saw emotions as caused by cognitions. The picture presented is, according to Bennett, "unflattering, coloured as it is by universal egoism ".

Spinoza's notion of blessedness figures centrally in his ethical philosophy. Spinoza writes that blessedness or salvation or freedom"consists, namely, in a constant and eternal love of God, or in God's love for men. Given that individuals are identified as mere modifications of the infinite Substance, it follows that no individual can ever be fully complete, i.

Absolute fondazione corrente spinoza biography, is, in Spinoza's thought, reserved solely for Substance. Nevertheless, modes can attain a lesser form of blessedness, namely, that of pure understanding of oneself as one really is, i. That this is what Spinoza has in mind can be seen at the end of the Ethicsin E5P24 and E5P25, where Spinoza makes two final key moves, unifying the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical propositions he has developed over the course of the work.

In E5P24, he links the understanding of particular things to the understanding of God, or Substance; in E5P25, the conatus of the mind is linked to the third kind of knowledge Intuition. From here, it is a short step to the connection of Blessedness with the amor dei intellectualis "intellectual love of God". As the Second Anglo-Dutch War raged and Spinoza grew confident in the near completion of his ethical system, he shifted his intellectual focus from writing The Ethics to the urgent complexities of society, religion, war, and politics.

It relies on biblical commentary, interpretation, history, philology, philosophy, legal analysis, and more to make its points. The work was published in and immediately caused an uproar across Europe. In his Political Treatise TPhe concludes tersely on the final page that women were naturally subordinate to men—a condition he attributed to inherent differences rather than societal structures, dismissing institutional explanations for their subordination.

Biographer Jonathan I. Israel remarked that his views on women were universal for the time. Spinoza was considered to be an atheist because he used the word "God" [Deus] to signify a concept that was different from that of traditional Judeo—Christian monotheism. InFriedrich Heinrich Jacobi published a condemnation of Spinoza's pantheism, after Gotthold Lessing was thought to have confessed on his deathbed to being a "Spinozist", which was the equivalent in his time of being called an atheist.

Jacobi claimed that Spinoza's doctrine was pure materialism, because all Nature and God are said to be nothing but extended substance. This, for Jacobi, was the result of Enlightenment rationalism and it would finally end in absolute atheism. Moses Mendelssohn disagreed with Jacobi, saying that there is no actual difference between theism and pantheism.

In tal senso si parla di geometria morale 2. Il discorso etico si intreccia strettamente con quello gnoseologico, ovvero legato alla struttura della conoscenza. Spinoza individua in particolare tre gradi della conoscenza:. Vedi tutti gli articoli di Pillole di Vai al contenuto. Vita e opere Spinoza nasce in una modesta famiglia ebraica ad Amsterdam, nel Condividi: Twitter Facebook.

Mi piace Caricamento Rather, the fondazione corrente spinoza biography simply asserts that God—conceived as a being before which one is to adopt an attitude of worshipful awe—is or is in Nature. And nothing could be further from the spirit of Spinoza's philosophy. Spinoza does not believe that worshipful awe or reverence is an appropriate attitude to take before God or Nature.

There is nothing holy or sacred about Nature, and it is certainly not the object of a religious experience. Instead, one should strive to understand God or Nature, with the kind of adequate or clear and distinct intellectual knowledge that reveals Nature's most important truths and shows how everything depends essentially and existentially on higher natural causes.

The key to discovering and experiencing God, for Spinoza, is philosophy and science, not religious awe and worshipful submission. The latter give rise only to superstitious behavior and subservience to ecclesiastic authorities; the former leads to enlightenment, freedom and true blessedness i. In Part Two, Spinoza turns to the origin and nature of the human being.

The two attributes of God of which we have cognizance are extension and thought. This, in itself, involves what would have been an astounding thesis in the eyes of his contemporaries, one that was usually misunderstood and always vilified. According to one interpretation, God is indeed material, even matter itself, but this does not imply that God has a body.

Another interpretation, however, one which will be adopted here, is that what is in God is not matter per se, but extension as an essence. And extension and thought are two distinct essences that have absolutely nothing in common. The modes or expressions of extension are physical bodies; the modes of thought are ideas. Because extension and thought have nothing in common, the two realms of matter and mind are causally closed systems.

Everything that is extended follows from the attribute of extension alone. Every bodily event is part of an infinite causal series of bodily events and is determined only by the nature of extension and its laws, in conjunction with its relations to other extended bodies. Similarly, every idea follows only from the attribute of thought.

Any idea is an integral part of an infinite series of ideas and is determined by the nature of thought and its laws, along with its relations to other ideas. There is, in other words, no causal interaction between bodies and ideas, between the physical and the mental. There is, however, a thoroughgoing correlation and parallelism between the two series.

For every mode in extension that is a relatively stable collection of matter, there is a corresponding mode in thought. Every material thing thus has its own particular idea—an eternal adequate idea—that expresses or represents it. Since that idea is just a mode of one of God's attributes—Thought—it is in God, and the infinite series of ideas constitutes God's mind or infinite intellect.

As he explains. It follows from this, he argues, that the causal relations between bodies is mirrored in the logical relations between God's ideas. One kind of extended body, however, is significantly more complex than any others in its composition and in its dispositions to act and be acted upon. That complexity is reflected in its corresponding idea.

The body in question is the human body; and its corresponding idea is the human mind or soul. The mind, then, like any other idea, is simply one particular mode of God's attribute, Thought. Whatever happens in the body is reflected or expressed in the mind. In this way, the mind perceives, more or less obscurely, what is taking place in its body.

And through its body's interactions with other bodies, the mind is aware of what is happening in the physical world around it. But the human mind no more interacts with its body than any mode of Thought interacts with a mode of Extension. One of the pressing questions in seventeenth century philosophy, and perhaps the most celebrated legacy of Descartes's dualism, is the problem of how two radically different substances such as mind and body enter into a union in a human being and cause effects in each other.

Spinoza, in effect, denies that the human being is a union of two substances. The human mind and the human body are two different expressions—under Thought and under Extension—of one and the same thing: the person. And because there is no causal interaction between the mind and the body, the so-called mind-body problem does not, technically speaking, arise.

The human mind, like God, contains ideas. Such ideas do not convey adequate and true knowledge of the world, but only a relative, partial and subjective picture of how things presently seem to be to the perceiver. There is no systematic order to these perceptions, nor any critical oversight by reason. Under such circumstances, we are simply determined in our ideas by our fortuitous and haphazard encounter with things in the external world.

This superficial acquaintance will never provide us with knowledge of the essences of those things. In fact, it is an invariable source of falsehood and error.

Fondazione corrente spinoza biography: ” Fondazione Corrente Seminario Spinoza.

Adequate ideas, on the other hand, are formed in a rational and orderly manner, and are necessarily true and revelatory of the essences of things. It involves grasping a thing's causal connections not just to other objects but, more importantly, to the attributes of God and the infinite modes the laws of nature that follow immediately from them.

The adequate idea of a thing clearly and distinctly situates its object in all of its causal nexuses and shows not just that it is, but how and why it is. The person who truly knows a thing sees the reasons why the thing was determined to be and could not have been otherwise. To perceive by way of adequate ideas is to perceive the necessity inherent in Nature.

Sense experience alone could never provide the information conveyed by an adequate idea. The senses present things only as they appear from a given perspective at a given moment in time. And Reason perceives this necessity of things truly, i. But this necessity of things is the very necessity of God's eternal nature. The third kind of knowledge, intuition, takes what is known by Reason and grasps it in a single act of the mind.

Spinoza's conception of adequate knowledge reveals an unrivaled optimism in the cognitive powers of the human being. Not even Descartes believed that we could know all of Nature and its innermost secrets with the degree of depth and certainty that Spinoza thought possible. Most remarkably, because Spinoza thought that the adequate knowledge of any object, and of Nature as a whole, involves a thorough knowledge of God and of how things related to God and his attributes, he also had no scruples about claiming that we can, at least in principle, know God perfectly and adequately.

No other philosopher in history has been willing to make this claim. But, then again, no other philosopher identified God with Nature. Spinoza engages in such a detailed analysis of the composition of the human being because it is essential to his goal of showing how the human being is a part of Nature, existing within the same causal nexuses as other extended and mental beings.

This has serious ethical implications. First, it implies that a human being is not endowed with freedom, at least in the ordinary sense of that term. Because our minds and the events in our minds are simply ideas that exist within the causal series of ideas that follows from God's attribute Thought, our actions and volitions are as necessarily determined as any other natural events.

What is true of the will and, of course, of our bodies is true of all the phenomena of our psychological lives. Spinoza believes that this is something that has not been sufficiently understood by previous thinkers, who seem to have wanted to place the human being on a pedestal outside of or above nature. Descartes, for example, believed that if the freedom of the human being is to be preserved, the soul must be exempt from the kind of deterministic laws that rule over the material universe.

Spinoza's aim in Parts Three and Four is, as he says in his Preface to Part Three, to restore the human being and his volitional and emotional life into their proper place in nature. For nothing stands outside of nature, not even the human mind. Our affects—our love, anger, hate, envy, pride, jealousy, etc. Spinoza, therefore, explains these emotions—as determined in their occurrence as are a body in motion and the properties of a mathematical figure—just as he would explain any other things in nature.

Our affects are divided into actions and passions. When the cause of an event lies in our own nature—more particularly, our knowledge or adequate ideas—then it is a case of the mind acting. On the other hand, when something happens in us the cause of which lies outside of our nature, then we are passive and being acted upon. All beings are naturally endowed with such a power or striving.

What we should strive for is to be free from the passions—or, since this is not absolutely possible, at least to learn how to moderate and restrain them—and become active, autonomous beings. We will, consequently, be truly liberated from the troublesome emotional ups and downs of this life. The way to bring this about is to increase our knowledge, our store of adequate ideas, and eliminate as far as possible our inadequate ideas, which fondazione corrente spinoza biography not from the nature of the mind alone but from its being an expresssion of how our body is affected by other bodies.

In other words, we need to free ourselves from a reliance on the senses and the imagination, since a life of the senses and images is a life being affected and led by the objects around us, and rely as much as we can only on our rational faculties. This provides Spinoza with a foundation for cataloguing the human passions. For the passions are all functions of the ways in which external things affect our powers or capacities.

Being a passion, joy is always brought about by some external object. Love is simply Joy accompanied by an awareness of the external cause that brings about the passage to a greater perfection. We love that object that benefits us and causes us joy.

Fondazione corrente spinoza biography: He began to study philosophy

We hope for a thing whose presence, as yet uncertain, will bring about joy. We fear, however, a thing whose presence, equally uncertain, will bring about sadness. When that whose outcome was doubtful becomes certain, hope is changed into confidence, while fear is changed into despair. All of the human emotions, in so far as they are passions, are constantly directed outward, towards things and their capacities to affect us one way or another.

Aroused by our passions and desires, we seek or flee those things that we believe cause joy or sadness. But the objects of our passions, being external to us, are completely beyond our control. Thus, the more we allow ourselves to be controlled by themthe more we are subject to passions and the less active and free we are. The solution to this predicament is an ancient one.

Since we cannot control the objects that we tend to value and that we allow to influence our well-being, we ought instead to try to control our evaluations themselves and thereby minimize the sway that external objects and the passions have over us. We can never eliminate the passive affects entirely. We are essentially a part of nature, and can never fully remove ourselves from the causal series that link us to external things.

But we can, ultimately, counteract the passions, control them, and achieve a certain degree of relief from their turmoil. The path to restraining and moderating the affects is through virtue. Spinoza is a psychological and ethical egoist. All beings naturally seek their own advantage—to preserve their own being—and it is right for them do so.

This is what virtue consists in. Since we are thinking beings, endowed with intelligence and reason, what is to our greatest advantage is knowledge. Our virtue, therefore, consists in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, of adequate ideas. The best kind of knowledge is a purely intellectual intuition of the essences of things. They are apprehended, that is, in their conceptual and causal relationship to the universal essences thought and extension and the eternal laws of nature.

But this is just to say that, ultimately, we strive for a knowledge of God. The concept of any body involves the concept of extension; and the concept of any idea or mind involves the concept of thought. But thought and extension just are God's attributes. So the proper and adequate conception of any body or mind necessarily involves the concept or knowledge of God.

Knowledge of God is, thus, the Mind's greatest good and its greatest virtue. What we see when we understand things through the third kind of knowledge, under the aspect of eternity and in relation to God, is the deterministic necessity of all things. We see that all bodies and their states follow necessarily from the essence of matter and the universal laws of physics; and we see that all ideas, including all the properties of minds, follow necessarily from the essence of thought and its universal fondazione corrente spinoza biographies.

This insight can only weaken the power that the passions have over us. We are no longer hopeful or fearful of what shall come to pass, and no longer anxious or despondent over our possessions. We regard all things with equanimity, and we are not inordinately and irrationally affected in different ways by past, present or future events. The result is self-control and a calmness of mind.

Our affects themselves can be understood in this way, which further diminishes their power over us. Spinoza's ethical theory is, to a certain degree, Stoic, and recalls the doctrines of thinkers such as Cicero and Seneca:. The third kind of knowledge generates a love for its object, and in this love consists not joy, a passion, but blessedness itself.

Fondazione corrente spinoza biography: Go to channel · All Evil.

It is also our freedom and autonomy, as we approach the condition wherein what happens to us follows from our nature as a determinate and determined mode of one of God's attributes alone and not as a result of the ways external things affect us. He also, despite the fundamental egoism, engages in behavior toward others that is typically regarded as "ethical", even altruistic.

Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Zone, Regrettably, its occasional insights are not properly examined and developed. Della Rocca, Michael. Routledge Philosophers. London and New York: Routledge, He presents the principle of sufficient reason as the key for understanding the entire system. Gueroult, Martial.

Collection Analyse et Raisons 12, Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, — Melamed, Yitzhak Y. New York: Oxford University Press, DOI: