History & The Arts
Trouble in paradise: The Dutch golden age
...c. 1665] Anonymous portrait of Spinoza, c. 1665. Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632. From a young age he was intellectually precocious, and after being expelled from his Jewish community because of his unconventional ideas about God, he worked as a lens-grinder while quietly developing his own philosophical system. Worried by the situation, in 1670 Spinoza...