This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

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Beuch de Spinoza died in 1677.

The cause was a lung illness probably caused by his breathing in of glass dust, for he'd spent

much of his life as a lens grinder.

Only after his death was his masterpiece the ethics published, and so it was only posthumously that he earned a reputation as one of the great rationalists of the age. In the ethics, a book written with the formal apparatus of geometry, definitions, axioms and so on,

he discusses a key concept in his philosophy, what he calls the passions.

So what does Spinoza mean by the passions?

Sue James is a Spinoza scholar and professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College.

Susan James, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Well, it's very nice to be here, thank you.

Now the topic I want to focus on today is Spinoza on the Pations.

But before we get on to the Pations, could you say a little bit about who Spinoza was?

Well, the Dutch always say that Spinoza is their top philosopher.

He was a Dutch philosopher living in the 17th century.

The son of two Portuguese Jewish immigrants who'd come to the community

of Amsterdam to escape religious persecution from the Inquisition.

His father and mother had arrived just a little while before he was born.

So that was the milieu in which Spinoza grew up.

And in his early 20s he started life as a merchant in this community, trading things with Portugal, mostly

olive oil and dried fruit and that sort of thing.

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