Happy Birthday Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)

A seventeenth-century Dutch Jew and rationalist philosopher who helped lay the groundwork for the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Although not an empiricist, Spinoza had an advanced understanding of science (for his day). Among other advances, he disputed Descartes mind-body dualism, arguing that what we perceive as two separate entities are really just two expressions of a single entity.