Tag: Spinoza

• Lorenzo Vinciguerra presents ‘Spinoza: The Prophet and the Sign’

  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…

  S. Gros

  November 15, 2025

  Philosophy

  baruch-spinoza, books, god, history, metaphysics, Philosophy, religion, Spinoza, theology

• Susan James presents ‘When does Truth Matter? The Politics of Spinoza’s Philosophy’

  This lecture explores a central tension in Baruch Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus: how can theology and philosophy be both strictly independent and yet arranged in a clear hierarchy of cognitive and ethical excellence? Written in the highly charged political and religious climate of the Dutch Republic, the Theological-Political Treatise was a polemical intervention in defence of…

  S. Gros

  November 15, 2025

  Philosophy

  god, history, Philosophy, religion, Spinoza

• Aaron Garrett presents ‘Knowing the Essences of State in Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus’

  Spinoza’s political philosophy is often treated as detachable from his metaphysics and epistemology, as though the Ethics and the Theological-Political Treatise (TTP) addressed fundamentally different projects. This talk challenges that division. Reading the Ethics together with the TTP and the Political Treatise, it argues that Spinoza’s political theory is organised around a robust, though rarely…

  S. Gros

  November 15, 2025

  Philosophy

  god, history, Philosophy, religion, Spinoza

• Catherine Malabou presents ‘Before and Above: Spinoza and Symbolic Necessity’

  In the Theological-Political Treatise, Baruch Spinoza elaborates a daring conception of revelation in which God is nothing other than the immanent order of nature, and prophecy is rooted in the imagination rather than in a privileged speculative intellect. Prophets do not receive transparent concepts but vivid images and signs shaped by their temperament, prior beliefs,…

  S. Gros

  November 15, 2025

  Philosophy

  god, history, Philosophy, religion, Spinoza

• Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic: Marx, Spinoza, and the Althusserians

  Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic: Marx, Spinoza, and the Althusserians is a rigorous, architectonic reconstruction of a philosophical problem that remains decisive for any contemporary science of society: how to read Capital as a positive, apodictic demonstration rather than as an echo chamber of Hegelian negation. Nick Nesbitt stages this reconstruction with an unusual clarity of…

  S. Gros

  September 1, 2025

  Philosophy

  dialectic, education, hegel, history, marx, metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics, Spinoza

• Dialectic Or Difference? Spinoza & Hegel On Individuation Between Thinking And Being

  Kerstin Andermann, speaking at the conference in Leuven, addresses the longstanding tension between Baruch Spinoza and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel on the question of how individuality arises from a unified reality. She shows that Hegel’s interpretation reduces Spinoza’s complex framework to what Hegel calls an “oriental unity” of nature, reality, and subjectivity, culminating in a…

  S. Gros

  March 25, 2025

  Philosophy

  dialectic, education, hegel, history, marxism, metaphysics, Philosophy, religion, Spinoza

• Spinoza On “Pride” [superbia]: Ontology And Sociopolitical Diagnosis

  Sybrand Veeger, a researcher at KU Leuven whose work focuses on Spinoza’s metaphysics and political psychology, has engaged in a detailed examination of Spinoza’s treatment of “pride” (superbia) in both the Ethics and the Political Treatise. His discussion, presented at the Conference “Spinoza and Negativity” in Leuven, explores how Spinoza’s emphasis on the commonality of…

  S. Gros

  March 25, 2025

  Philosophy

  christianity, education, ethics, metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics, religion, Spinoza, theology

• Spinoza and The Incompleteness of Durational Existence

  Florian Vermeiren, a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven’s Institute of Philosophy, presented an in-depth analysis of Spinoza’s metaphysics. The presentation took place at the conference “Spinoza and Negativity” at KU Leuven, Belgium, on September 25–27, 2024. Vermeiren’s core argument addresses Hegel’s critique that Spinoza’s system, allegedly lacking the principle of negativity, collapses the diversity of…

  S. Gros

  March 25, 2025

  Philosophy

  consciousness, god, metaphysics, Philosophy, religion, Spinoza, theology

• Inversion of Nature and Negation of Negation in Spinoza

  Anne Texier, speaking at the conference on Spinoza and Negativity at KU Leuven, offers a thorough exposition of the ways in which Spinoza’s philosophy can be understood as involving both an “inversion of nature” and a “negation of negation.” Although Spinoza’s metaphysics is commonly described as an ontology of positivity, there are numerous instances in…

  S. Gros

  March 25, 2025

  Philosophy

  dialectic, education, hegel, metaphysics, Philosophy, religion, Spinoza, theology

• Schelling and Spinoza: Realism, Idealism, and the Absolute

  Schelling and Spinoza: Realism, Idealism, and the Absolute by Benjamin Norris is a rigorous philosophical excavation of the intersection between Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s transcendental and speculative idealism and Baruch Spinoza’s rationalist metaphysics. This work reconstructs Schelling’s engagement with Spinoza’s substance monism to illuminate the persistent philosophical tensions between realism and idealism that animate Schelling’s…

  S. Gros

  December 16, 2024

  Philosophy

  dialectic, education, god, hegel, history, kant, metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics, religion, Spinoza, theology

• The Political Form of the Hegelian Concept: On the Influence of Spinoza’s Political Philosophy on Hegel’s Metaphysics

  The international philosophical conference Between Substance & Subject. The Presence of Spinoza in Hegel, held from October 26 to 28, 2023, at the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film, and Television (AGRFT) in Ljubljana, was a major scholarly event jointly organized by the University of Padua and the University of Ljubljana—Faculty of Arts and AGRFT. The…

  S. Gros

  November 20, 2024

  Philosophy

  dialectic, education, hegel, history, metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics, Spinoza, theology