Simon Gros

Lorenzo Vinciguerra offers a systematic reading of Spinoza’s critique of prophecy, scriptural interpretation, and the regime of signs by placing these themes at the centre of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise and relating them to the broader architecture of the Ethics. Beginning from Spinoza’s formal definition of prophecy as a kind of sure knowledge revealed by God yet immediately distinguishing this from the natural knowledge accessible through the light of reason, Vinciguerra reconstructs how Spinoza differentiates prophetic cognition, rooted in imagination, from philosophical cognition, grounded in clear and distinct ideas.

In this framework, prophecy is understood as a mode of knowing that is inseparable from images, affects, and the linguistic habits of particular historical communities. The prophets, Spinoza insists, do not possess a superior intellect; they possess a more vivid and powerful imagination, and their messages therefore appear in parables, allegories, and anthropomorphic depictions of God. Vinciguerra traces the consequences of this claim: prophetic discourse becomes exemplary of a semiotics of imagination, where corporeal and affective images mediate the divine for a non-philosophical audience. This places prophecy within a single, continuous order of nature rather than outside it, and integrates it into Spinoza’s monistic ontology, in which human minds and bodies are modes of one and the same infinite substance.

A central focus of the lecture is Spinoza’s notion of signum and the structure of what Vinciguerra terms double-sign revelation. In Spinoza’s analysis, prophecy carries only moral, not mathematical, certainty; prophetic imaginings never guarantee their own truth but must be confirmed by a further sign. Abraham, Gideon, Moses, Hezekiah, and others ask for signs so that they may know that a message is truly from God rather than a mere product of their imagination. Prophetic certainty thus depends on a sign that validates another sign: the initial imaginative revelation and its subsequent confirmation are both semiotic events. Vinciguerra shows how this recursive dependence on signs marks a structural limit of prophecy when measured against philosophical knowledge, which, for Spinoza, carries its own certainty by virtue of its intelligible clarity and its derivation from the nature of God.

On this basis, the lecture also reconsiders Spinoza’s programmatic separation of theology and philosophy. Where traditional interpreters sought in Scripture hidden philosophical doctrines, Spinoza demands that the Bible be read as it stands, with the help of philological and historical tools, without importing external metaphysical systems. Vinciguerra emphasizes that this methodological decision is inseparable from Spinoza’s semiotics: once prophecy is understood as imaginative and sign-mediated, theology becomes a discourse aimed at obedience and piety, whereas philosophy pursues truth through reason. The two domains are thus autonomous yet coordinated within a single ontological order; they operate with different criteria of validity, different audiences, and different kinds of signs, but they are no longer allowed to police one another. This shift has clear political stakes in the Theological-Political Treatise, where Spinoza links superstition, abusive claims to prophetic authority, and theological control of interpretation to the erosion of civil peace and intellectual freedom.

By revisiting these arguments from within Spinoza’s own texts, Vinciguerra’s presentation connects early modern debates on prophecy and revelation to contemporary questions about religious authority, scriptural hermeneutics, and the place of imagination in public reason. His interpretation shows how Spinoza’s critique of prophecy does not simply discredit religious discourse but relocates it within a general theory of signs and affects, thereby opening a space in which faith, philosophy, and politics can coexist without subordinating thought to dogma.

Lorenzo Vinciguerra is a distinguished philosopher, Full Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna and director of the international research center Sive Natura – International Center for Spinozan Studies (ICSS). His research ranges across Spinozism, early modern philosophy, moral philosophy, and aesthetics, with particular attention to the intersections between rational structures and imaginative practices. In parallel, he is Professor at the University of Amiens, where he directed the Centre de recherche en arts et esthétique (CRÆ) from 2012 to 2020 and founded the aesthetics journal Tetrade. He has also co-directed the long-running seminar on General Anthropology and Philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris (2007–2021), contributing to sustained dialogue between philosophy, anthropology, and the arts.

Vinciguerra’s academic trajectory is markedly interdisciplinary and international. Trained initially in painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan under Vincenzo Ferrari, he later completed a degree in philosophy at the State University of Milan with Carlo Sini. His postgraduate work at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa with Paolo Cristofolini and at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris led to a Diplôme d’études avancées (DEA) at the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, the Agrégation de philosophie, a PhD under Pierre-François Moreau, and ultimately the Habilitation à diriger des recherches (HDR) at EHESS under Jean-Marie Schaeffer. This formation at the crossroads of visual arts, historical scholarship, and systematic philosophy informs his distinctive reading of Spinoza’s theory of prophecy and signs, in which textual analysis, conceptual reconstruction, and attention to images and imagination are closely interlinked.