40 pages into Ian Buruma’s fascinating biography of the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, some very modern language leaps from the page. “When people are banished from their community,” Buruma ...

The beguiling Dutch philosopher’s life and work is prone to misunderstandings and misreadings. A recent biography goes so far as to recruit him into the culture war. Ad Policy A portrait of Benedict ...

Spinoza was one of the founding fathers of the Idealist school of philosophy, and was described by Bertrand Russell as, "the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers". Brauch Spinoza was ...

In March, 1668, Adriaan Koerbagh, a Dutch physician in his mid-thirties, hired Johannes Van Eede, a printer in Utrecht, to publish his new book, “A Light Shining in Dark Places, to Shed Light on ...

Baruch Spinoza’s life was a product of paradox. The 17th century, in Europe, was a time of both barbarous sectarianism and unprecedented human achievement. It was an era of new ideas — ideas that ...