Is there an ‘Italian’ school of Spinoza studies? Some present and future perspectives

Abstract

This paper sketches a bottom-up reconstruction of the panorama of Italian Spinoza studies over the past three decades. It tries to capture the self-representation of the Italian scholarly community starting from the analysis of collective volumes, and then exploring the results of a survey among the members of the newly established Italian Societas Spinozana, complemented by individual interviews with leading Spinoza scholars. What emerges is a past heritage centered on historical and philological research, but also deeply interested in political themes and in bringing Spinoza into dialogue with contemporary issues. Today, Spinoza studies in Italy seem to be in a transitional phase, in which a solid bridge must be built between older and younger generations of scholars, negotiating how to handle the heritage of the former and orienting the new perspectives of the latter.