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This chapter begins with an account of the life of Spinoza. It then discusses his great work, the Ethics, and the proof of its fundamental claim that there is just one substance, and that everything else which in any manner exists is a mode of it. There follows an account of Spinoza’s form of determinism and its ethical and religious significance and of his distinction between rational and irrational action. Finally there is a discussion of Spinoza’s views on institutionalized religion, and on Jesus. The chapter ends by asking whether Spinozism offers a ‘personal religion’.

This chapter opens with an analysis of the intellectual climate in late 17th‐century England, beginning with politico‐religious debates, in particular the complex struggles inside and outside the Church of England after the Glorious Revolution, and the perceived threat from Socinianism, unbelief, and ‘atheism’. It also shows how the intellectual climate was affected by the impact of Cartesian philosophy as well as the ideas of Hobbes, the revival of Epicureanism, particularly the ideas of Gassendi, and the spread of Spinozism. The English mortalist tradition is presented in this context, which helps to show how Locke's hypothesis of ‘thinking matter’ fits into the picture in a way which is not always sufficiently realized. An understanding of these complex currents of thought allows us to re‐think the significance of the Boyle Lectures and the aims of their authors.

The early responses to the Treatise show that the issue of “atheism” was neither peripheral nor irrelevant to the way that Hume's own contemporaries understood his aims and objectives. Most contemporary Hume scholars maintain, however, that this label, not only misrepresents Hume's intentions in the Treatise but that it also misrepresents his position on the subject of religion as presented in his later writings (which are understood to be more “directly” or “explicitly” concerned with religion). The immediate aim of this chapter is to develop a clearer understanding of the way that Hume and his contemporaries interpreted “atheism” and the specific doctrines that were associated with it. Once this standard is (back) in place, we will be in a position to determine the extent to which the charge of “atheism” fits the actual content of the Treatise.

This chapter considers to what extent the irreligious interpretation of the Treatise supports the charge of “atheism” and how this relates to Hume's philosophical commitments in his later writings in so far as they concern religion. The most accurate and informative label for describing Hume's views on this subject is irreligion—which is the label used here to describe Hume's fundamental intentions in the Treatise. Irreligion is a term that both Hume's contemporaries and our own would understand and can apply to Hume's arguments and outlook without any serious misrepresentation. Calling Hume's views on this subject irreligious avoids, on one side, attributing any form of unqualified or dogmatic atheism to him, while, on the other, it also makes clear that his fundamental attitude toward religion is one of systematic hostility and criticism (i.e. he believes that we are better off without religion and religious hypotheses and speculations). Nevertheless, Hume's early critics were well justified in their view that the label of “atheism” was a natural fit, given their own understanding of this term and the evident irreligious features contained in Hume's writings.

This chapter begins by considering the alleged gap between Spinoza’s philosophy and the ‘Spinozism’ rife in the Early Enlightenment. It argues that Early Enlightenment ‘Spinozism’ was broadly faithful to Spinoza’s system even if normally also a considerably simplified, thinned-down vulgarization. Early Enlightenment ‘Spinozism’ was also heavily influenced by the account of Spinoza’s thought in Bayle’s article ‘Spinoza’, the longest of all the entries in his Dictionnaire historique et critique of 1697. The chapter then discusses the exact relationship of the Radical Enlightenment to the making of ‘modernity’ and clarifies the relation of Locke, Voltaire, and Hume to the phenomenon of Spinoza and the Radical Enlightenment.

After suffering for many years his sickness of the lungs, a form of tuberculosis or phthisis, Spinoza passed away quietly on a Sunday afternoon when much of the neighbourhood, in the centre of The Hague, was at church, aged 44 years and three months, on 21 February 1677. He lived much of his life in seclusion, cherishing the tranquillity he needed to develop and refine his philosophy. Yet, via an amazing process of transmogrification, no sooner was he dead than he became a cult figure, a secular ‘saint’ and an object of hagiography in the eyes of disciples and followers, some of whom initiated a deliberate campaign to heroicize his image, deeming this an effectual means of advancing the radical intellectual programme to which they were committed. From the 1680s there are many reports in Dutch and French sources affirming the rapid spread of Spinozist influence in different localities and at various levels of society.

By the early 18th century the widening perception of Spinozism as the prime and most absolute antithesis and adversary of received authority, tradition, privilege, and Christianity had generated a psychological tension evident throughout the academic world and ‘Republic of Letters’. To label someone a ‘Spinozist’ or given to Spinozist propensities was effectively to demonize that person and demand his being treated as an outcast, public enemy, and fugitive. The suspicion among the academic fraternity that preoccupation with the refined mathematical ‘Cartesianism’ of a De Volder, or the semi-Leibnizian mathematical rationalism of a Bernouilli, might all too readily provide a secure haven, lodged at the heart of academe, for crypto-Spinozism remained widespread in the early 18th century in the Netherlands, Germany, and the Baltic, lands where Cartesianism remained broadly dominant in the opening two decades of the century. The anxiety and instability resulting from this tension, as well as the innate contradictions within late Cartesianism, erupted during the second decade in an uproar which may appropriately be called the ‘Nature of God’ controversy.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the Greek ‘revolution’ as being Man’s first great ‘enlightenment’ — the Presocratics’ discovery of philosophical argument and criticism. It focuses on Xenophanes of Colophon, one of the most vigorously debated of the Presocratics before 1750. The chapter then turns to 3rd-century bc philosopher Strato of Lampsacus, who is widely believed to be the ancient precursor of Spinoza.

In his 1955 “The Case of Spinoza”, Emmauel Levinas accepts Jacob Gordin's summary verdict: “Spinoza was guilty of betrayal”. Levinas gives as the main reason for his condemnation that Baruch Spinoza sought to overcome Judaism with Christianity, then Christianity with a philosophical wisdom considered to represent the proper—that is, the intellectual—love of God. However, the harsh judgment about Spinoza's “betrayal” is mitigated and qualified in importantly nuanced ways, to the extent that Levinas praises Spinoza's writings, especially the Theologico-Political Treatise and the Ethics (despite their major blind spot in a probable ignorance of rabbinic literature, especially the Talmud), for their remarkable, albeit largely latent, “anti-Spinozism”. Levinas's anti-Spinozism has a remarkable element of Spinozism. This chapter examines what Levinas comes to call “interiorization” and to what extent it presupposes an interrogation of the theologico-political meaning of Scripture.

This chapter explores the wider and largely Continental story of how the Stoics became atheists. The Neostoicisms of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century had been explicitly intended as supplements to mainstream varieties of Christianity. Indeed, even Lipsius remained consistent with his argument that Stoicism, with respect to both its ethics and its physics, provided an appropriate philosophical framework for a well-lived Christian life. Though a number of factors during the seventeenth century had contributed to the Stoics' atheistic turn, as this chapter shows, this shift within Stoicism is credited to Benedict Spinoza and his detailed examinations on the nature of God.

The word ‘immanence’ is one of the terminological constants in Gilles Deleuze's philosophical work. Deleuze's views on immanence emerge from problems internal to the Kantian philosophical tradition. This book tries to put in question the view that Deleuze's philosophy is a direct return to pre-critical metaphysics, whether in the forms of Spinozist or Scholastic metaphysics, or in the more contemporary form of Whiteheadian process-philosophy. It seems that Deleuze is claiming that philosophical grounding takes place in the existential, the logico-rationalist, and the critical kinds of questioning that is important for the acquisition of autonomous thought and for reason to be realised. Deleuze fluctuates over the course of his work about the status of Baruch Spinoza's philosophy of immanence and expression. Immanence for Deleuze must involve more than an unproblematic sealing of a circle between de facto experience and metacritique.

This chapter explores how, during the latter half of the seventeenth century, the Jewish world was shaken spiritually more profoundly than at any time since the expulsions of the late fifteenth century. A mounting turmoil of inner pressures erupted in the 1650s and 1660s in a drama which was to convulse world Jewry for decades. Moreover, although this Jewish upheaval had some separate and independent roots, unconnected with the current intellectual preoccupations of Christian Europe, it took place during, and shared some causes with, the deepening crisis besetting seventeenth-century European culture as a whole. Inevitably, the ferment within the Synagogue interacted on the wider upheaval within European devotion and thought, the one chain of encounters pervading the other in a remarkable process of cultural transformation. Ultimately, the upheaval is perhaps best understood as a cultural reaction to the immense disruptions and migrations of the previous two centuries and the many unresolved contradictions the vast treks, first to the East and then to the West, had given rise to. It may be true that the reintegration of Jews was more economic than cultural, yet the rifts and disintegrative tendencies within western Christendom had placed the age-old confrontation of Christianity and Judaism on a totally new basis. The chapter then looks at the Shabbatean movement, Spinozism, philosemitism, and anti-Semitism.

This chapter examines the tensions between Schopenhauer’s very advanced thought concerning the Oriental-Occidental relationship, on the one hand, and his own inadequacy to this thought, on the other hand. Concerning the first: in principle he assumes groundlessness, rather than denying it; he makes impossible all typology; and he overcomes Eurocentrism in philosophy and religion. Concerning the second, as I show in detail, he erases these insights in various ways: he envisions the overcoming of groundlessness through the will’s self-negation; he claims a privilege for his own philosophical “letter”; and he explicitly invokes typology in contexts that are constitutive for his philosophical position. These contexts include: his treatment of the history of religion, his discussion of church-state relations, his characterization of his own ethics, and his positioning of his philosophy as a whole with respect to pantheism and Spinozism. In showing how Schopenhauer repeatedly turns against his own best (and most difficult) insights, the chapter also analyzes his virulent and influential anti-Semitism, and exposes the ways in which it is integrally related to his thought on the Orient, and to his philosophy as a whole.

This book focuses on Spinoza and his many known identities. Although there are many Spinozas, all of them converge at least on one point—his “naturalism.” The two pillars of Spinozism cannot be denied, namely, the identity of God and Nature and the tenet that “man” is but a tiny “part of Nature.” Existence for Spinoza is horizontal; the infinite creative force of nature is not separable from the infinitely many beings that exist. Spinoza’s naturalism denies human exceptionalism in any form. Like any other thing in nature, humans are corporeal and ideal, inevitably immersed in a system of cause and effect, and each comprising a power that is infinitely surpassed by the totality of other beings.

Diderot’s natural philosophy, which emerges some decades prior to the appearance of the term ‘biology’ in the 1790s, is profoundly ‘biologistic’. Both the metaphysics of vital matter in D’Alembert’s Dream and the more empirical concern with physiology in his unpublished Elements of Physiology display a fascination with the uniqueness of organisms. This ‘biologism’ presents Diderot’s interpreter with some difficulties, notably regarding his materialism, for contemporary forms of materialism reject emergence, vitalism, teleology or other appeals to biological irreducibility. Here I examine a little-known aspect of Diderot’s proto-biological project: his association of epigenesis with Spinozism in the short article “Spinosiste.” Why defend a particular developmental theory in an entry on Spinoza (who was barely concerned with the specific properties of organisms)? My response also addresses the relation of Diderot’s biological project to biology as a science that appeared after his death. Indeed, Diderot’s ‘epigenetic Spinozism’ stands conceptually outside the history of biology.

This chapter claims that Spinozism may be the philosophical instrument best adapted to deal with the situation humanity is now living through. One can discover in Spinoza a perspective on actuality, as well as an investment into the desire to gain knowledge of the societal and power structures that are currently evolving. The chapter argues that a Spinozan sociology can be established on the basis of a strategy of amor. Love, as defined by Spinoza, introduces the rational and constructive relationship between constituent ontological potency and the collective action of the singularities. A possible Spinozan sociology embraces amor as a subversive force, depicting society as the constitution of the common, the intersection of the desire and rationality of singularities, and the path of common liberty.

The stimulus of French vital materialism was decisive in provoking key developments in German life-science. The paradigm shift associated with the ideas of Buffon, Maupertuis, Diderot and La Mettrie around mid-century dramatically re-oriented the focus of natural inquiry in the direction of a non-mathematical physical science, or experimental Newtonianism. Crucial in this was the “Buffonian Revolution” in natural history, which aimed to elevate inquiry into life forms from the descriptive and classificatory approach of traditional natural history to the explanatory ambitions associated with natural philosophy. Diderot and Maupertuis were crucial allies of Buffon in this revolution and La Mettrie carried it into metaphysical arenas by proclaiming the ascendancy of the médecin philosophe who alone could resolve traditional philosophical issues based on a physiological understanding of human nature. There would be no room for supernatural explanations in such inquiry. This naturalism was linked to Epicurean materialism and “Spinozism,” alarming the conservatives of the day in France. Such metaphysical provocations proved as pivotal to the conflict between Buffon and Réumur over the future of natural history as did their methodological differences.

This chapter talks about Hegel’s reading and interpretation of Spinozism. Hegel claims that Spinoza occupies the position of a precursor, finding in the latter’s work all the characteristics of an aborted project hindered by overwhelming difficulties. The Hegelian reading of Spinoza, particularly the concept of causa sui, reveals an internal contradiction: it searches for the signs of “truth” within Spinoza’s teachings, while at the same time discovers the real form of its absence. Through his book Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel regards the philosophy of Spinoza as a completely abstract school of thought; it unfolds only through the abolition of its content, through a negative perspective, according to its own failures and absurdity.