Early modern · 1632–1677
Who influenced Baruch Spinoza?
Influences and legacy
God-or-Nature, one substance, freedom as understanding necessity — excommunicated for it.
Baruch Spinoza was influenced by Maimonides, Giordano Bruno, Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes, and went on to influence Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Moses Mendelssohn, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Georg W. F. Hegel, F. W. J. Schelling, Friedrich Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze. That is 11 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.
Read on Wikipedia Portrait: anonymous, Public domain See the whole map
Who was Baruch Spinoza?
Spinoza was born in Amsterdam to a Portuguese-Jewish family that had fled to the tolerant Dutch Republic. After questioning rabbinic authority he was expelled from the Jewish community in 1656, left all religious affiliation and lived by grinding lenses, surrounded by a circle of followers. Influenced by Stoicism, Hobbes and Descartes, he became a leading philosopher of the Dutch Golden Age and a forerunner of the Enlightenment.
His Theological-Political Treatise questions the divine origin of the Hebrew Bible and argues that church authority has no place in a secular, democratic state. His Ethics equates God with nature, a view read as pantheist, panentheist or atheist, and asks what human freedom means in such a world. Most of his work appeared only after his death, published by friends.
Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.
Who influenced Baruch Spinoza?
4 direct influences on this map, earliest first.
- Maimonides 1138–1204
- Giordano Bruno 1548–1600
- Thomas Hobbes 1588–1679
- René Descartes 1596–1650
Who did Baruch Spinoza influence?
7 thinkers on this map draw directly on Baruch Spinoza.
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1646–1716
- Moses Mendelssohn 1729–1786
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 1729–1781
- Georg W. F. Hegel 1770–1831
- F. W. J. Schelling 1775–1854
- Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900
- Gilles Deleuze 1925–1995
The line of teachers behind Baruch Spinoza
The longest documented line of influence ending at Baruch Spinoza runs 16 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.
Two steps away from Baruch Spinoza
Indirect influences
- Through René Descartes: Augustine of Hippo, Anselm of Canterbury, Al-Ghazali, Thomas Aquinas, Michel de Montaigne
- Through Maimonides: Aristotle, Avicenna, Solomon ibn Gabirol
- Through Giordano Bruno: Nicholas of Cusa, Marsilio Ficino
- Through Thomas Hobbes: Francis Bacon, Hugo Grotius
The second generation
- Through Georg W. F. Hegel: Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner, Alexander Herzen, Søren Kierkegaard, Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx, Wilhelm Dilthey, T. H. Green, John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Kitarō Nishida, György Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Jacques Lacan, Alexandre Kojève, Theodor W. Adorno
- Through Friedrich Nietzsche: Lev Shestov, Muhammad Iqbal, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault
- Through Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Christian Wolff, Émilie du Châtelet, Immanuel Kant, Gottlob Frege
- Through F. W. J. Schelling: Pyotr Chaadayev, Vladimir Solovyov
- Through Moses Mendelssohn: Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
Contemporaries of Baruch Spinoza
Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of Baruch Spinoza, with no direct line between them.
- John Locke 1632–1704
- Anne Conway 1631–1679
- Nicolas Malebranche 1638–1715
- Blaise Pascal 1623–1662
- Margaret Cavendish 1623–1673
- Pierre Bayle 1647–1706
Baruch Spinoza by the numbers
- Direct influences
- 4
- Direct followers
- 7 — #12 of 279 on this map
- Thinkers upstream
- 71
- Thinkers downstream
- 109
- Wikipedia languages
- 122 — #10 of 36 among early modern philosophers
- Card rarity
- Legendary
Questions about Baruch Spinoza
- Who influenced Baruch Spinoza?
- Maimonides, Giordano Bruno, Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes.
- Who did Baruch Spinoza influence?
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Moses Mendelssohn, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Georg W. F. Hegel, F. W. J. Schelling, Friedrich Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze.
- When did Baruch Spinoza live?
- 1632–1677. The map files Baruch Spinoza under the early modern period.
- How rare is the Baruch Spinoza card?
- Wikipedia carries an article on Baruch Spinoza in 122 languages, which makes it a Legendary card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.
More early modern philosophers
- René Descartes 1596–1650
- Immanuel Kant 1724–1804
- Voltaire 1694–1778
- Adam Smith 1723–1790
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712–1778
- Niccolò Machiavelli 1469–1527
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1646–1716
- John Locke 1632–1704