Ethics

by Benedict de Spinoza (Author) , Don Garrett (Introduction By)

Series: Wordsworth Classics of World Literature

Format: Paperback / softback 368 pages

Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd

Imprint: Wordsworth Editions Ltd

Edition: New ed

ISBN: 9781840221190

Published: 5 Mar 2001

Weight: 236g

Dimensions: 193 x 119 x 20 (mm)

Pub. Country: United Kingdom

Description

Translated by W.H.White and A.K.Stirling. With an Introduction by Don Garrett. Benedict de Spinoza lived a life of blameless simplicity as a lens-grinder in Holland.

And yet in his lifetime he was expelled from the Jewish community in Amsterdam as a heretic, and after his death his works were first banned by the Christian authorities as atheistic, then hailed by humanists as the gospel of Pantheism. His Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order shows us the reality behind this enigmatic figure. First published by his friends after his premature death at the age of forty-four, the Ethics uses the methods of Euclid to describe a single entity, properly called both 'God' and 'Nature', of which mind and matter are two manifestations.

From this follow, in ways that are strikingly modern, the identity of mind and body, the necessary causation of events and actions, and the illusory nature of free will.