Benedict De Spinosa (1632-1676) was one of the most influential Western thinkers of the seventeenth century. A Jew, he was born in 1632, in Holland, so that according to Jewish tradition, religion formed the chief subject of his education open-minded Spinoza showed no inclination to accept blindly teaching of religious texts, and he gave free expression to his revolutionary thought, ideas and doubts.
He accepted the free thinking of Aristotle and Descartes, and himself indulged hi free and individualistic thinking that did not meet with the approval of a hidebound Jewish community because his thinking injurious to their religion and opinions, his comrades proscribed Spinoza when he was 24 Leaders society instructed the group that no one was to converse complete obscurity.
According to the Jewish tradition he was required to receive training in some handicraft, he had taken up the trade of grinding lenses. He remained a bachelor throughout his life, and spent his days in philosophic
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“Meditation while he earned a meager livelihood from grinding lenses. Many of his well wishers tried frantically to improve his lot, so much so that he was even invited to a chair in the Heidelberg University in Germany, but he was content to remain in his present position.
His was a simple life, much of his time being spent in study, contemplation and thought. In his solitary life he produced four books, the most important being ethics. It throws light on mind, emotion, intelligence and other psychological aspects of human personality.
To it Spinoza the important place he holds in the history of ethics. Spinoza spent his pure and peaceful life in following a profession that brought him disease, as a consequence of which at the young age of 44 this great thinker completed the part he was to play on this stage of the world.
The Highest Good:
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In Spionza’s philosophy man’s highest good has been seen to exist in the love of God. In the 31st proposition of the fifth chapter of his work Ethics, Spinoza writes that the third kind of knowledge, in the form of its own model cause, is based on the mind to the extent to which the mind is permanent.
This third kind of knowledge proceeds from specific concepts of specifics attributes of God and reaches adequate knowledge of the essence of filings, and the more we know objects the better do we know God.
Hence, according to Spinoza, dies greatest superiority of the human mind lies in understanding objects in the context of God’s specific attributes. Only this can give intellectual contentment to man. The moiré knowledge of this kind a man has, the greater is his awareness of himself and of God and the more is his genteelness and perfection.
Knowledge of God and of the kinds of objects adds to man’s happiness. Intellectual love of God has its beginning in this third category of knowledge race to this knowledge is conjoined the realization that God is eternal and not that he is omnipresent.