Death of Benedictus de Spinoza

Benedictus de Spinoza died on 21 February 1677 in The Hague, aged 44. A Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish descent, Spinoza was born in Amsterdam and was expelled from the Jewish community in 1656 for his views, after which he lived modestly as a lens grinder. His masterpiece, the Ethics, published after his death, sets out a system in the form of geometric proofs in which God and Nature are one substance and everything follows by necessity. His Theological-Political Treatise argued for freedom of thought and applied a critical, historical reading to the Bible. Both works were condemned as dangerous in his time, but he became one of the central thinkers of the Enlightenment and of modern philosophy. He died of a lung illness in The Hague.

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