Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Sephardi origin. One of the early thinkers of the Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism, including modern conceptions of the self and the universe, he came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy
The first part of the book addresses the relationship between God and the universe. Spinoza was engaging with a Tradition that held: God exists outside of the universe; God created the universe for a reason; and God could have created a different uni...
