Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 into a family of Jewish merchants who had fled from Portugal, and studied Hebrew and the sacred texts at the Jewish school. At twenty-three, for questioning traditional doctrine, he was expelled for ever from the Jewish community of Amsterdam in the harshest terms. He then left trade and earned his living grinding optical lenses, living simply and independently. When the University of Heidelberg offered him a professorship of philosophy, he politely declined in order to keep his freedom of thought. He died of a lung disease at forty-four, perhaps aggravated by years of breathing in glass dust. Hegel said: 'Either Spinozism or no philosophy at all.'