Reading room

Letters

Baruch Spinoza

Philosophical correspondence with Henry Oldenburg, Robert Boyle, Christiaan Huygens, Johannes Hudde, Willem van Blijenbergh, Lodewijk Meyer, Simon de Vries, Jarig Jelles, Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, Leibniz, Albert Burgh, Nicolas Steno and Hugo Boxel, among others. It deals with the infinite, the attributes of God, evil, freedom, ghosts, the vacuum and optics, and contains some of his most precise formulations: all determination is negation, the critique of freedom as ignorance of causes, the refusal of the Heidelberg chair, the harsh reply to the convert Burgh.