About

Why this edition exists, and how it was made

A personal note

I first read the Ethics in my early twenties, after learning about Spinoza through the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss. At the time I was hoping to become a pastor in my Pentecostal church, a Christian theologian and professional apologist. Spinoza's work was instrumental in broadening my perspective and revising my deeply held beliefs. I want to make the Ethics more available and easier to read for a lay audience with little training in Latin or philosophy, so that more people may discover and experience the beauty of Spinoza's seminal work.

Sources

Latin: Spinoza Ethica on The Latin Library, a clean transcription of the posthumous 1677 text. English: R. H. M. Elwes's translation of 1883, Project Gutenberg ebook #3800.

Canonical IDs

Sections are referenced with conventional scholarly ids: E for Ethica, the part number, then one of D (Definition), A (Axiom), P (Proposition), with sub-codes for D (Demonstration), S (Scholium), C (Corollary). Example: E1P11 — Part I, Proposition XI (the existence of God).

Method

The Latin and English are parsed independently into canonical sections, aligned by their scholarly id, and rendered side-by-side. Every page is rendered statically and reads fully without JavaScript; where it is available, JavaScript adds conveniences — type-ahead search, the interactive map, inline citation and concept previews, and keyboard navigation — without ever being required to read the text.

Source available under EPL-1.0 (code) and CC BY 4.0 (data).