If you’ve ever wanted a complete scientific roadmap for how to live, a modern philosophy to go by, a lens through which to understand a complex world, a foundation, the 17th century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza is as good as you'll find. He asked questions like: why are we so dogmatic? What makes us irrational? Why do we live as slaves to our emotions and others' opinions?
He was one of the first Enlightenment advocates for real democracy, and was the first to really criticize the bible as just a text. He was vilified for his perceived atheism and excommunicated from the Jewish community where he lived. I look at Spinoza’s most influential text, The Ethics, look at what his ideas about god were and why he was a Pantheist, ask what substances, modes, and attributes are, and why he argues that the ‘many is one’.
This video looks at the affects, the idea of conatus, the ‘free person’, rationalism, his stoicism, and ideas of morality and benevolence.