This is Philosophy Bites with me Nigel Wolberton and me David Edmunds.

If you enjoy Philosophy Bites, please support us. We're currently unfunded and all donations

would be gratefully received. For details go to www.philosophybites.com.

It's perhaps not surprising that the 17th century Dutch philosopher Barocottis Benosa would

argue in support of free speech. Of Portuguese Jewish origin, his controversial ideas on God

and ethics got him kicked out of his community. But quite how radical was his position on

free speech. He is one of the leading scholars on Spinoza, Stephen Nadler.

Stephen Nadler, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

I was good to be back, thanks for having me again.

We're going to be talking about Spinoza and freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

Spinoza was quite remarkable philosopher. What did you have to say about free speech?

Well, he was way ahead of his time and the theological political treatise, which was published

in 1670, to great alarm, cause a great scandal for its various views on miracles, the Bible

and religion. But he also devoted several chapters to mostly political matters. And chapter

20 of the treatise has this remarkable statement where he says that in a free commonwealth,

every man may think as he pleases and say what he thinks. Which on the face of it, it

looks like he believes in an absolute freedom of speech and absolute freedom of expression,

which would include freedom of the press, freedom of literature and so on. Everyone should

be free to think as he pleases and say what he thinks, whether in voice or in writing.

So it looks like for Spinoza, at least on the face of it, there to be no restrictions

on what people can say and write and print. That's quite unusual actually when people

talk about freedom of expression because most people want to set some limits. The question

...