Spinoza’s Place in Twentieth Century Anglo-American Philosophy

Abstract

This paper began as an address at the 100th anniversary celebration of the Vereniging het Spinozahuis in Amsterdam in 1997. I trace the highlights of Spinoza reception and scholarship in the Anglo-American philosophical community from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Beginning with the British Idealists’ enthusiasm for Spinoza as a systematic metaphysician, I move through the indifference of the (anti-metaphysical) positivists to the renewal of interest among more naturalistically-minded analytical philosophers in the second half of the twentieth century. Along the way there are brief discussions of a few individual thinkers who engaged with Spinoza in especially interesting or influential ways, such as Caird, Santayana, Russell, Wolfson, Hampshire, and Curley.