Profile: Baruch Spinoza

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was a Dutch philosopher whose pantheistic philosophy influenced Arne Naess’s development of deep ecology. Writing in the 17th century, Spinoza proposed a monistic view of reality in which God and Nature are identified as one substance.

In his major work Ethics, completed in 1677, Spinoza uses the formula “Deus sive Natura” (God or Nature). He proposes that only one infinite substance exists, and that everything we experience is a mode or expression of this single reality. This view dissolves distinctions between the divine and the natural world.

Profile: Val Plumwood

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Val Plumwood was an Australian ecofeminist philosopher whose rigorous critique of dualism revealed how Western philosophy’s hierarchical separation of reason from nature, mind from body, and human from animal justified both environmental destruction and social oppression. Her work demonstrated that ecological and feminist struggles share common philosophical roots.

Plumwood’s masterwork “Feminism and the Mastery of Nature” (1993) analyzed how Western thought constructs dualisms that enable domination. Pairs like reason/nature, male/female, and human/animal reinforce each other in what she called “the logic of colonization” - where the inferior (nature, women, animals) becomes resource for the superior.

Rationalism on deep ecology

Profile: Baruch Spinoza

Profile: Val Plumwood