The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers

Spinoza is the only Jewish member of Durant’s pantheon (except for a brief treatment of Henri Bergson), and so the chapter begins with a brief overview of the Jewish experience, one of dispersion and persecution across many centuries. Jewish philosophy flowered in Muslim-dominated Spain, and then went into decline falling the expulsion of Spanish Jews in 1492. Some of the exiled fled to Holland and built a flourishing community which produced Baruch (also known as Benedictus) Spinoza.

Spinoza followed his synagogue education with training in Latin and European philosophy, admiring Descartes’s “desire to explain all of the world except God and the soul by mechanical and mathematical law” (167). His philosophizing led to his excommunication, with the Jews of Holland eager to assure the Christian masters in the middle of their own religious wars that they would not have one more front of heresy to confront.

After surviving an assassination attempt, he adopted the name Benedict, lived with several Christian patrons, and produced most of his writings, only a few of which he published during his lifetime. Despite his relative seclusion and modest means, he gained enough fame to win a pension from King Louis XIV after French forces defeated the Dutch in 1672.