Baruch Spinoza has been called the Prince of Philosophers; Hegel said of him that the alternative was: either Spinoza, or no philosophy at all. By laying the groundwork for the 18th-century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism, including modern conceptions of the self and the universe, he came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy: he had the courage to criticize the traditionalism of religion, to offer a conception of God that would be logic instead of rigidly defined by a shallow dogma.