The Ethics

Baruch Spinoza composed a philosophical work titled The Ethics in Latin. The book is a comprehensive attempt to use Euclids technique in philosophy. The link between God and the cosmos is discussed in the first section of the book. Additionally he contends that the cosmos is what it is due to necessity rather than divine will or a religious explanation. According to this perspective rather than being Gods creation the cosmos is made of God. The human mind and how we come to understand our ideas as well as those of other bodies are the main topics of the second section. According to Spinoza we cannot know our minds any more intimately than we know our bodies. Spinoza contends that all things including people try to maintain their perfection of power in being unaffected in the third section of his Ethics. According to Spinoza power and virtue are equivalent. The fourth section examines human emotions which according to Spinoza are mental faculties that lead us to seek out and avoid pleasure and misery. The fifth section makes the case that reason can control the effects of the pursuit of virtue which for Spinoza is self-preservation. Only with reasons help can people tell which passions are beneficial to virtue from those that are ultimately destructive.