Baruch Spinoza

Introduction.) Even though humans believe that they are free to act and think any way they choose, in reality they cannot. (Hergenhahn & Henley, 2014.) The reason why we think this way, according to Baruch Spinoza, is because human ignorance makes us believe that we possess free will. (Spinoza Video.) Spinoza insisted that the best life was one lived with a knowledge of the causes of things. The closest thing we can get to freedom is understanding what causes our behavior and thoughts. Our…

to be finite, it cannot be caused by something else. For Spinoza, there is only one substance, God, who has all infinite attribute both in thought and extension. Unlike God, man are finite modes of those attributes. In turn, man are susceptible to wrong actions and errors due to this limitation. These actions are merely products of the mental acts called choices, which are also an effect of causal sequence rooted in the nature of God. Spinoza, unlike Descartes, believes that there is no such…

Exposition- Baruch Spinoza was famous for his criticism of the church. He was born November 24, 1632, in Amsterdam to an extremely religious family. When he was 23 years old, he was excommunicated from the Jewish community because of his new ideas. Spinoza believed that God and Nature were one substance, and happiness could be obtained through the love of them. He thought that the knowledge of God should be open to all people because the church had control over everyone using the power of fear…

The Immortal Jew In his essay titled Concerning the Jews, Mark Twain wrote: "If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one-quarter of one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.”1 The Jewish…

Gender Roles Versus Rationalism Gender roles and stereotypes start at an early age beginning with dressing children a certain way, buying them gender based toys, and often ridiculing the child for doing something opposite or inappropriate for their gender preference. Basic gender stereotypes for men include being controlling, manipulative, independent, assertive, dominant, and competitive. Basic female gender stereotypes include being relatively passive, loving, sensitive, supportive in social…

1 Compare and contrast the views of John Searle and Rene Descartes on dualism. Dualism claims that all real objects are either physical or nonphysical. Rene Descartes maintains that reality is composed of two substances: mind and body. Mind is immaterial essence and body in material essence. All our thoughts and feelings are immaterial and exist in our mind, while our body exists in material space. He believed that they interact with each other at some point in the body. On the other hand,…

Rationalist philosopher Descartes implies that we can never really know for certain if we are actually living the life we believe we are. We could be sleeping at this very moment and dreaming about all this? We could be living in a phony computer simulation and we wouldn’t know it. I believe that Descartes and modern scientists are actually onto something here and aren’t as crazy as they seem to be. In this essay, I will summarize rationalism and Descartes’ First Meditation. I will also be…

Philosophy Final How does Gordon Marino answer the question in his title “What’s the Use of Regret?” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/opinion/whats-the-use-of-regret.html Do you agree? Why or why not? In the article “What’s the Use of Regret?” Gordon Marino depicts where regret originates and its uses. Marino starts off by narrating an instance where he met a former Vietnam draftee, the man told him he used to gamble and in one occasion while consuming alcohol he gambled a Vietnamese kid and…

Research on Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud was a very important figure in American History of Child Development. He was known for his theory about the conscious and preconscious mind. “Freud didn’t really invent the idea of the conscious versus unconscious mind, but he certainly was responsible for making it popular.” The conscious mind is pretty much self-explanatory, the conscious mind is what you are aware of at any moment (examples: fantasies, feelings, memories, present perceptions,…

and cause us to cease concerning ourselves with the three highest goods. If everyone believed in pantheism, we could potentially and finally have world peace. First of all, what is pantheism? For this paper we are going to use Baruch Spinoza’s version of pantheism. For Spinoza, God is everything. Put differently, anything that is, is God. Not only does that include everything in nature, but it includes everything that falls under the nature of law, so…