Spinozism

Spinozaism is the philosophy of Jewish-Dutch thinker Baruch Spinoza. Spinozaism combines a commitment to a number of Cartesian metaphysical and epistemological principles with elements from  ancient Stoicism,  Hobbes, and medieval Jewish rationalism into a nonetheless highly original system. The naturalistic views on God, the world, the human being and knowledge serve to ground a moral philosophy centered on the control of the passions leading to virtue and happiness. They also lay the foundations for a strongly democratic political thought and a deep critique of the pretensions of Scripture and sectarian religion.

Theory of Substance
For Spinoza, Substance underlies our experience, but it can also be known by its various attributes. He does not specify how many attributes substance has, but he says that human beings, at least, can conceive of two — namely, the attribute of extension (physicality) and the attribute of thought (mentality). For this reason, Spinoza is also known as an “attribute dualist”, and he claims that these two attributes cannot be explained by each other, and so must be included in any complete account of the world.

[[File:Pantheism.png]] Pantheism [[File:PanRational.png]]
Spinoza’s theory is often referred to as a form of pantheism — the belief that God is the world, and that the world is God. In Spinoza’s system, the world is not a mass of material and mental stuff — rather, the world of material things is a form of God as conceived under the attribute of extension, and the world of mental things is that same form of God as conceived under the attribute of thought.

Core Works

 * Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
 * Ethics

Wikipedia

 * Baruch Spinoza