Widely accepted as a philosophical masterpiece, Ethics sets out to explain nothing less than the nature of God, the world, and how we should live. Rejecting some of the most deeply held presuppositions of classical and medieval thought, Spinoza makes the radical claim that God and the universe are in fact one and the same, a single substance with infinite attributes. Ethics is famously complex, its elaborate and self-referential matrix of definitions and propositions unfolding across five sections. Published in 1677, it was largely shunned for decades, but remains strikingly original in its metaphysics and virtually unparalleled in its scope.