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If Spinoza’s treatise, The Ethics, had predated the scriptures of the major world religions, I wonder how we would view God and religious life today. Would deism rank alongside the major faiths in its number of adherents? I think that readers of The Ethics, if they paid it serious attention and took the time to study it, may be surprised by how radical and yet how reasonable Spinoza’s ideas and conclusions are. Yet he was expelled from his community for his views, even though where he lived, the Netherlands in the 17th century, was considered among the most liberal countries in the world. Hence, it is worth examining his life briefly before plunging into his canonical work since understanding who Spinoza is and the context of his times can help us understand why his ideas were controversial then and even today.
While Spinoza may be best known for his metaphysics today, we have to remember that his aim in The Ethics is to lay out an ethical system on how we should live, as individuals and as a society. But before he can talk about ethics, he needs to address the nature of the beings that ethics apply to, that is, human beings. Before he can talk about human beings, he needs to talk about the nature of all of reality, which is why he begins with God. The idea is to understand the nature of reality and from that understanding figure out the nature of human beings. From understanding both these foregoing concepts, he can then talk about how we should live.

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Bibliography
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Kluz, Christopher. ‘Moral Responsibility without Free Will: Spinoza’s Social Approach’. In Doing without Free Will: Spinoza and Contemporary Moral Problems, edited by Ursula Goldenbaum. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2015.
Lord, Beth. Spinoza’s Ethics: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide. Edinburgh Philosophical Guides Series. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.
Nadler, Steven. ‘Baruch Spinoza’. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2022. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2022. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/s....
Pink, Thomas. Free Will: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Rosenthal, Michael A. ‘Why Spinoza Is Intolerant of Atheists: God and the Limits of Early Modern Liberalism’. The Review of Metaphysics 65, no. 4 (June 2012): 813–39.
Spinoza, Benedictus de. A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works. Translated by E. M. Curley. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1994.
———. The Ethics. Translated by R. H. M. (Robert Harvey Monro) Elwes, 1997. https://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabe....

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