This book contains eighteen papers on Spinoza, dating from 1974 to 2012, seventeen of which were published before in a wide variety of journals and edited volumes. Together they present us with a sustained analysis of Spinoza’s metaphysics, his ethics and politics, and the way in which German philosophers from Leibniz to Hegel and Schelling responded to the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher they admired and occasionally feared as well. Although Spinozas Philosophie is well written, it clearly is no introduction to Spinoza. Instead it addresses the initiated, among whom its author, Wolfgang Bartuschat, is mainly known for his 1992 Spinozas Theorie des Menschen and his translations of Spinoza’s works into German, the last installment of which, containing the Briefwechsel, was published in 2017. Materially, Bartuschat is known for his insistence that the naturalism propounded in Spinoza’s Ethics did not prevent its author from developing a proper anthropology. Thus, for quite some time now, his interpretation of Spinoza has served as a source of inspiration to students of the Ethics who remained unconvinced by the extremely influential French, essentially Althusserian and Deleuzian emphasis on Spinoza’s purported anti-humanism. Jointly, the papers collected in Spinozas Philosophie elucidate the background as well as the general structure of Bartuschat’s particular perspective.

Throughout his career Bartuschat has argued in favor of a moral interpretation of Spinoza’s thought, as it is only the human mode of substance, the human mind is able to grasp itself as a mode of substance, and by doing so to achieve freedom within a universe otherwise ruled by the same necessity with which it exists in the first place. Bartuschat demonstrates convincingly how Spinoza’s metaphysics not only determines man’s dependence on “the Absolute”—as he typically prefers to identify Spinoza’s concept of substance—but also allows for the very possibility of formulating a metaphysics by man. Since everything which exists strives for its perseverance, man’s finitude does not preclude the possibility of achieving some degree of autonomy: being part of God’s infinite intellect the human mind is able to reflect about itself, recognize its own essence, and thus conquer its finitude by affirming it. Having determined Spinoza’s metaphysics in the first part of this collection, Bartuschat subsequently sets out to demonstrate its moral ramifications. Man’s most perfect actions consist in understanding the world we live in and, ultimately, in knowing God. In one of the finer essays of this collection on Spinoza’s understanding of pietas, Bartuschat deftly compares the ways in which the concept occurs both in the Tractatus theologico-politicus and in the Ethics, alternatively as the outcome of divine command and a command of reason itself.

In the third and final part of this book Spinoza is situated against the background of the German tradition. It starts off with two chapters in which Spinoza’s concept of conatus is compared to Leibniz’s monads and Kant’s views on teleology. After two further chapters on Spinoza’s notion of freedom in relation to Schelling and Fichte, it seems fitting in more than one way that this impressive collection of papers is completed by a meditation on Hegel’s assessment of Spinoza: according to Bartuschat, Hegel’s rendering of Spinoza’s metaphysics of substance failed to appreciate the real differences separating his own conception of the absolute from Spinoza’s, as he failed to recognize the reflective nature of Spinoza’s theory of the subject.