Baruch Spinoza was a problem. Actually, Spinoza is still a problem—a good problem for Jews, Christians, philosophers, psychoanalysts, politicians, and historians of ideas. Indeed, Spinoza represents a problem for all of us. His philosophical work is provocative, enlightening, joyous, and demanding in that it moves us to open our minds and think rationally and critically about our ideas and ourselves, while it cautions us to carefully eschew a reliance on authority, tradition, superstition, or the social pressures of our community.

Spinoza has been seen by many—Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, and Nietzsche among them—as a radical thinker. He is perhaps the radical