Baruch Spinoza is experiencing something of a Renaissance, not his first. He goes in and out of fashion. I attribute the recent rebirth to Gilles Deleuze’s book, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1988), but so much has been written about Spinoza in the last several decades, and from such different perspectives, including neuroscience and feminism, that Deleuze could just be a part of a periodic eruption of interest. /1/ I return to Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza as a theorist of joy later. A lot depends on how one translates the Latin word for “joy.”
My argument doesn’t always fit together neatly. One might attribute this to my deficient rhetoric. Or, one might attribute it to the different interpretations of Spinoza that are offered, for example, by Carlisle contra Nadler. I attribute it to Spinoza himself; he is simply unable to hold to the assumptions about God that his argument requires.