Baruch Spinoza, a Dutch philosopher active in the latter part of the 17th century enlightenment, is best known for his work The Ethics, in which he presents a worldview that is fundamentally deterministic, characterized by a strict law of nature in which every event and action, including human decisions, is entirely the result of prior events and laws. 

Classical interpreters of Spinoza have therefore described Spinoza as a so-called hard determinist, and that free will therefore does not exist. It has also been emphasized that Spinoza's determinism also represents features of necessarianism as he also claims that only what actually happens is possible.

But Spinoza also describes that there is a human will and a degree of personal freedom for humans, he describes a model for human nature and also argues how a free person can and should live. 

Some modern interpreters of Spinoza have therefore discussed to what extent Spinoza can be said to combine the existence of some personal freedom with the deterministic world he describes, and whether this fact disturbs the view of Spinoza as a representative of hard determinism.

This paper aims to discuss how Spinoza describes the functioning of his concept of freedom in the deterministic world he describes. And how should we look at Spinoza from our modern philosophical point of view: can we consider that Spinoza represents a compatibilist view? 

Keywords: Spinoza, determinism, necessarianism, compatibilism, free will, human autonomy.