Spinoza and Spinozism in Twenty-First Century Anglophone Philosophy

Abstract

In this paper, I survey some prominent developments in Spinoza scholarship in English-speaking countries in the past quarter-century. Picking up where Tom Cook left off in his analysis of the reception of Spinoza in Anglo-American philosophy in the hundred years after the founding of the Vereniging Het Spinozahuis (1897–1997) (“Spinoza's Place in Twentieth Century's Anglo-American Philosophy”), I seek to identify some of the main currents in the rich profusion of twenty-first century Spinoza scholarship in the USA, UK, Canada, and Australia. Scholarship on Spinoza’s metaphysics has continued to blossom, harkening back in some respects to the idealist interpretations with which Cook opens his survey. But whereas there was a notable lack of scholarly works on Spinoza’s moral and political philosophy in the twentieth century, there is now an abundance of scholarship in these fields. I will conclude by examining the reach of Spinozism in the twenty-first century, looking at the ways in which scholars and journalists have presented Spinoza’s philosophy to a non-academic readership, and exploring the ways in which contemporary metaphysicians and philosophers of emotion and cognition have cast their work under the “brand” of Spinozism.