Dalle Passions all'Ethica : continuità, trasformazioni, interpretazioni

Spinoza’s relationship with Descartes was always characterized both by proximity and distance. This ambivalence does not fail to affect the history of reception, from Spinoza’s death to the present day. However, the path of this history shows a remarkable paradigm-shift. From the anti-Cartesianism and anti-Spinozism of sixteenth and eighteenth centuries until the most authoritative contemporary reading, we move indeed from a perspective, in which Descartes’ thought would show germs of Spinozism – and Spinoza would therefore be in some sense more Cartesian than Descartes himself – to an opposition so radical as to reject any point of contact. In order to critically question both this relationship and the history of its interpretations, it is crucial to analyse the complex dialogue, which in his Ethics Spinoza establishes with Descartes’s Passions of the Soul. Although very dense, this dialogue has only been studied little in its detail.