Books like Spinoza by Roger Scruton

Plato’s collection of dialogues, featuring Socrates, interrogates virtue, love, politics, and the nature of knowledge—questions that have shaped Western thought for millennia.

A comprehensive English edition of Baruch Spinoza’s works, featuring clear translations by Samuel Shirley and a concise introductory essay by Michael L. Morgan that situates Spinoza within Western philosophy, culture, and key intellectual themes.

"This entertaining and enlightening graphic narrative tells the exciting story of the seventeenth-century thinkers who challenged authority--sometimes risking excommunication, prison, and even death--to lay the foundations of modern philosophy and science and help usher in a new world...Heretics! tells the story of their ideas, lives, and times in a vivid new way. Crisscrossing Europe as it follows them in their travels and exiles, the narrative describes their meetings and clashes with each other--as well as their confrontations with religious and royal authority. It recounts key moments in the history of modern philosophy, including the burning of Giordano Bruno for heresy, Galileo's house arrest for defending Copernicanism, Descartes's proclaiming cogito ergo sum, Hobbes's vision of the "nasty and brutish" state of nature, and Spinoza's shocking Theological-Political Treatise." -- Publisher's description.

I. By that which is self-caused, I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent.