René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza are two of the greatest thinkers of the Modern Era; people said that they freed philosophy from the shackles of the Middle Ages and raised questions that would forever remain central. Descartes directly linked the existence of a human being to the ability to think (“I think, therefore I am”), and he also claimed that “intelligence is passion.” The boundaries of the world and of knowledge, the place and role of a person in the world, ethical norms such as good and evil, love and hatred, contempt and self-abasement, conscience—everything is explored with extraordinary depth in the works of Descartes and Spinoza presented in this book.