Ethics, the philosophical treatise among Spinoza's notable works, stands as the piece most consistently cited when his name appears in the history of ideas. It is a work of philosophy, and alongside it the concept of conatus figures as a second notable contribution associated with his thinking. Together they represent the intellectual labor that has kept his name in circulation across the centuries since his death in The Hague on 21 February 1677.

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam on 24 November 1632, a citizen of the Dutch Republic of Portuguese-Jewish, Sephardi origin. His family background placed him within a community whose presence in Amsterdam carried the long memory of Iberian displacement, and the languages he used across his life — Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Latin, French, and Italian — reflect the breadth of that cultural inheritance. He received part of his education at Leiden University, a detail that anchors him within the institutional intellectual life of the Dutch Republic even as his later career moved well beyond any single institution.

He worked as a philosopher, a grinder of lenses, an optician, a grammarian, a theologian, a political scientist, and a Bible translator. These were not merely incidental occupations but the overlapping forms of labor through which he moved through the world — practical work with glass and light alongside sustained engagement with scripture, language, and the structure of political life. He worked across seven languages, a range that speaks to the texture of his intellectual environment and to the diversity of the communities and texts he engaged.

He died in The Hague on 21 February 1677, having been born in Amsterdam forty-four years earlier — a lifespan short enough that the full scope of what he undertook across philosophy, theology, grammar, translation, and the optical trades registers as a considerable concentration of effort. Ethics remains the work most directly associated with his name, and conatus the concept most closely linked to his philosophical contribution. Those two items, drawn from the record of what he left behind, form the concrete foundation on which any account of his life must rest.