Baruch de Spinoza or Benedictus de Spinoza (1632–1677), a highly controversial, influential and significant figure in the history of Western and Jewish thought, has been the subject of a vast amount of literature, including both philosophical and literary works in genres as diverse as fiction and nonfiction. His life and philosophy have long attracted the attention of multidisciplinary scholarship. Along with Hugo Grotius, Jan Amos Comenius, René Descartes and Pierre Bayle, Spinoza was one of the leading intellectual figures of the Dutch Golden Age and the early Age of Enlightenment in the Dutch Republic. A highly original and systematic thinker, he exerted a profound influence on philosophy in the Age of Reason, despite his status as an outcast and his early death at the age of 44. Also,