Peter Bolland

Join us for another in our series on the great philosophers, this time, Baruch Spinoza. A Sephardic Jew of Portuguese ancestry, Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632. Often at odds with the Rabbis of his own immigrant community, Spinoza would go on to wrestle with ideas of God, meaning, and the universe in startling, influential ways. Arguing for an absolute monism, Spinoza believed that God was simply the name of the energy that binds everything together—a kind of pantheism, thus sealing his enemy status in both Jewish and Christian circles. He nevertheless persisted in taking full advantage of the liberal intellectual climate of the Netherlands to further pursue his ideas and change the course of Western religion and philosophy.