Work · Rationalism
Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order
Definitions, axioms, propositions: God or Nature and the path to freedom.
Introduction
Spinoza worked on the Ethics from the early 1660s and finished it around 1675, but did not dare to publish it. It appeared in Latin after his death in 1677 in his “Posthumous Works”, with only his initials on the title page. Its five parts treat God, the nature of the mind, the emotions, human bondage to the emotions and the freedom that reason brings. Each part proceeds like Euclid from definitions and axioms to propositions with proofs, but the many scholia, explanatory notes, contain much of the argument in ordinary prose. The phrase “God or Nature” appears in Part IV. In the 1780s the book became the centre of the pantheism controversy in Germany.
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Connections
Criticizes
- Meditations on First Philosophy1641 · René Descartes
Taken up in
- On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers1799 · Friedrich Schleiermacher
- Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom1809 · Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
- Difference and Repetition1968 · Gilles Deleuze
- Ecology, Community and Lifestyle1976 · Arne Næss
- The Savage Anomaly1981 · Antonio Negri
Criticized in
- The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy1690 · Anne Conway
- Historical and Critical Dictionary1697 · Pierre Bayle
- Letters to Serena1704 · John Toland
- Monadology1714 · Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn1785 · Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
More works by Baruch de Spinoza
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