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Description:

Thank you to @epochphilosophy for lending their voice for this video.

If you’ve ever wanted a complete scientific roadmap for how to live, a modern philosophy to go by, a lens through which to understand a complex world, a foundation, the 17th century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza is as good as you'll find. He asked questions like: why are we so dogmatic? What makes us irrational? Why do we live as slaves to our emotions and others opinions.

He was one of the first Enlightenment advocates for real democracy, and was the first to really criticise the bible as just a text. He was vilified for his perceived atheism and excommunicated from the Jewish community where he lived.

I look at Spinoza’s most influential text, The Ethics, look at what his ideas about god were and why he was a Pantheist, ask what substances, modes, and attributes are, and why he argues that the ‘many is one’. We look at the affects, the idea of conatus, the ‘free person’, rationalism, his stocism, and ideas of morality and benevolence.

Sources:

Steven Nadler, Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die

Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightening: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750

Giles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy

Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics

Beth Lord, Spinoza’s Ethics

Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Enlightenment

Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy