This seminar is a close examination of Spinoza’s most seminal work, the Ethics, with a special focus on the merit of freedom it advances as its highest and ultimate goal. The Ethics culminates in a discussion of freedom of mind or blessedness—the highest level of human excellence –which Spinoza identifies with the mind’s salvation and experience of eternity. We will analyze the nature of human freedom, according to Spinoza, given his strict determinism and dismissal of free will or free choice, and a variety of related issues such as, for example, the role of the body in the way to freedom, Spinoza’s theory of action and practical reason, his account of the affects and his moral psychology, his ethical theory, and finally the mind’s highest level of freedom in the third kind of knowledge.