So argue two Spinoza scholars, Clare Carlisle (KCL) and Yitzhak Melamed (Johns Hopkins) in this interesting TLS essay; an excerpt:
The fate of the Ethics in the Anglo-American world is another story. In the 1970s and 80s most analytic philosophers regarded Spinoza as an uncritical and extravagant metaphysician, whose strange ideas might – at best – be allowed into serious discourse only once domesticated. This often meant abstracting his arguments from his complex engagement, constructive as well as critical, with Jewish and Christian scriptural and philosophical traditions.
This uneasy reception of the Ethics into contemporary anglophone philosophy changed dramatically with the re-emergence of analytic metaphysics in the 1990s. A new generation of rigorously trained philosophers and historians of philosophy – all of them indebted to Edwin Curley’s astute, scholarly translation of the Ethics – found Spinoza’s strict naturalism, uncompromising systematicity and deep aversion towards anthropocentric illusions immensely attractive. Don Garrett and Michael Della Rocca did groundbreaking work that repositioned Spinoza as a meticulous rationalist. In 2017 Della Rocca assembled twenty-five scholars to produce The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, much of it devoted to metaphysical issues arising from the Ethics, and since then OUP has published significant books on Spinoza’s metaphysics by the North American philosophers Sam Newlands and Martin Lin, as well as an outstanding new collection of papers by Garrett. The recent explosion of Spinoza studies – and of contemporary metaphysics and epistemology inspired by Spinoza – has resulted in a deep reorientation in analytic as well as continental philosophy. In many ways, Spinoza is now replacing Kant and Descartes as both the compass and the watershed of modern thought.
It is probably true that the "Spinoza boom" has something to do with the return of "analytic metaphysics," but since fashions change, sometimes quickly, that may mean the boom is short-lived.
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