In Part Five of the Ethics, Spinoza claims that there is something that “pertains to the mind’s duration without relation to the body” (E5p20s), and that “the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains that is eternal [aeternum]” (E5p23). However, there seems to be nothing personal about this eternal aspect of the mind. While it might be possible to individuate one eternal mind from another – by virtue of their respective ideas and their representational contents and through each mind’s “formal essence” as the idea in Thought of a particular body in Extension – the eternal mind is not an immortal “soul” or self that, via consciousness and memory, is the postmortem continuation of the person in this lifetime. The eternity of the mind is certainly not something that encourages thinking about death and the afterlife, much less something in which one might find comfort or that should be an object of hope or fear. While some scholars do regard Spinoza as trying to accommodate a traditional doctrine of personal immortality (e.g.

The Quakers, or the Religious Society of Friends, is a dissenting Protestant sect, arising during the English Civil War, devoted to the idea that each human being has the ability, through “the light within,” to experience God in themselves and in others. Spinoza’s relationship with the Quakers in Amsterdam has long been a subject of speculation, primarily on the basis of the correspondence of William Ames, an Englishman leading the Quaker mission in Holland. Ames may have been referring to Spinoza when he wrote to Margaret Fell, often called “the mother of the Quakers,” in April 1657 that

In Part 4 of the Ethics, Spinoza argues that the “free person [homo liber],” who is guided by reason and sees what is truly in his or her own best interest, will strive to bring other people to the same level of rational perfection. “The good which everyone who seeks virtue wants for himself, he also desires for other men” (E4p37).

Spinoza consistently maintained throughout his philosophical career that the terms “good” (bonum) and “bad” (malum) do not refer to intrinsic (non-relational), absolute features of things in the world. There are no individuals or objects or states of affairs in nature that, in and of themselves and without relationship to anything else, are good or bad. As Spinoza states in the Preface to Part Four of the Ethics, “as far as good and evil are concerned, they also indicate nothing positive in things, considered in themselves” (ii/208).

Spinoza began composing his Compendium Grammatices Linguae Hebraeae in the late 1660s. He was still working on it when he died in 1677; the unfinished text was included in the Latin OP that Spinoza’s friends published that year, but not the contemporaneous Dutch NS.

On July 27, 1656 (the 6th of Av, 5416, on the Jewish calendar), Bento (Baruch) de Spinoza was formally expelled from the Portuguese-Jewish community of Amsterdam by the ma’amad, or governing board, of the Talmud Torah congregation. The writ of ostracism (or ban), called a herem, may originally have been composed in Hebrew and read before the congregation in the synagogue. However, it is extant only in a Portuguese version entered in the Livro dos Acordos da Naçao e Ascamot, the community’s record book. Spinoza was only twenty-three years old when the herem was issued; as far as we know he had not yet written anything.

In this passage, we see Maimonides wrestling with a certain tension in his life: on the one hand, a devotion to his time-consuming obligations as a physician, to healing the sick among the wealthy and the poor; on the other hand, his personal desire for the opportunity to engage in the study of Torah and other religious and philosophical texts. He is torn between two competing values: the life of practical activity and the life of contemplation.