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- Rejecting messianism and the emphasis on the afterlife, Spinoza emphasized appreciating and valuing life for oneself and others. By advocating for individual liberty in its moral, psychological, and metaphysical dimensions, Spinoza helped establish the genre of political writing called secular theology.
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Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (Latin: Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata), usually known as the Ethics, is a philosophical treatise written in Latin by Baruch Spinoza (Benedictus de Spinoza). It was written between 1661 and 1675 [1] and was first published posthumously in 1677.
Aug 11, 2022 · In the Ethics (1677), Spinoza describes a totally determined world: endless chains of cause and effect in which physical events (what Spinoza speaks of as things considered under the ‘attribute of extension’) follow rigid laws, and result directly from earlier events.
- Guiding Metaphysical Principles
- Moral Philosophy in Spinoza’s System
- Spinoza’s Remedies For The Passions
- Conclusion
- References and Further Reading
The name of Spinoza’s most famous work is the Ethics, but he does not really broach the topic of ethics until part four of the five-part work. The reason for this is that although his aim is to set forth “the right way of living” (E4app, G II/266) and to explain “what freedom of mind, orblessedness, is” (E5pref, G II/277), his accounts of these thi...
a. Spinoza’s Metaethics: Moral Anti-Realism
Spinoza’s metaphysical views quickly commit him to a version of moral anti-realism. A moral realist holds that at least some things are good or bad independently of what we desire or believe to be the case. Spinoza, in numerous passages in the Ethics and earlier works, denies that there are any such moral qualities. His rejection of moral realism is tied up with his rejection of teleological explanations of nature, for he sees the attribution of qualities like goodness or perfection as an err...
b. Spinoza’s Ethics: Ethical Egoism, Contractarianism, and Virtue Theory
The previous section established that Spinoza is a moral anti-realist in the sense that he denies that there exist mind-independent moral properties. Nevertheless, on most readings of the Ethics, Spinoza is also an ethical egoist, since he holds that reason “demands that everyone love himself, seek his own advantage…and absolutely, that everyone should strive to preserve his own being as far as he can” (E4p18s; see also TTP Ch. 16, 175). These two views are compatible, however, since Spinoza’...
c. Applications of Spinoza’s Moral Theory
In the course of developing his moral theory, Spinoza sometimes applies it in passing to what he recognizes are traditional moral problems. He is often somewhat dismissive of many of these traditional moral problems, and his treatment of them rarely includes the sort of depth they receive in works of applied moral philosophy. However, his responses to such problems are often interesting because, given the demands of other parts of his philosophical system, his proposals are often surprising a...
In the 17th century, moral philosophy was not yet primarily preoccupied with either accounting for the nature and origins of morality or with establishing general principles governing moral obligation—though, as we have seen, Spinoza does develop some views on these topics en route to the final part of the Ethics. Rather, in this period, one of the...
In Spinoza’s view, human moral judgments are grounded in human desires or beliefs. However, in spite of this anti-realist metaethics, Spinoza endorses an intellectualist version of ethical egoism: reason dictates that we seek our greatest good, and this greatest good is understanding. He further tempers his ethical egoism by endorsing a version of ...
a. Primary Sources
Passages from Spinoza’s Ethics are cited in the usual way. For example, ‘E1p25’ refers to Ethicspart 1 proposition 25; ‘E1p25d’ refers to the demonstration of that proposition; ‘E1p25s’ to its scholium; and ‘E1p125c’ to its corollary. Reference to the Gebhardt edition page numbers is provided where the usual citation would refer to a span of more than one page. 1. Descartes, Rene. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes [vols. I–II], eds. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch. (Cambridg...
b. Secondary Sources
1. Bennett, Jonathan. A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1984). 2. Curley, Edwin. Behind the Geometrical Method. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 3. Curley, Edwin. “Spinoza’s Moral Philosophy.” In Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. M. Grene (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 354–376. 4. Della Rocca, Michael. “Egoism and the Imitation of the Affects in Spinoza.” In Spinoza on Reason and the ‘Free Man’: The Jerusalem Conference [vol. 4...
Author Information
John Grey Email: jrtgrey@gmail.com Michigan State University U. S. A.
Feb 3, 2009 · Attributes sit at the very heart of Spinoza’s metaphysics. They enable us to understand and talk about an extended world and a thinking world in terms of which we understand such things as bodies and minds.
In his masterpiece, Ethics (1677), he constructed a monistic system of metaphysics and presented it in a deductive manner on the model of the Elements of Euclid. He was offered the chair of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg but declined it, seeking to preserve his independence.
Jun 29, 2001 · Bento (in Hebrew, Baruch; in Latin, Benedictus: all three names mean “blessed”) Spinoza was born in 1632 in Amsterdam. He was the middle son in a prominent family of moderate means in Amsterdam’s Portuguese-Jewish community. As a boy he had undoubtedly been one of the star pupils in the congregation’s Talmud Torah school.
Published shortly after his death, the Ethics is undoubtedly Spinoza's greatest work—an elegant, fully cohesive cosmology derived from first principles, providing a coherent picture of reality, and a guide to the meaning of an ethical life.
