Es inevitable que a esta convicción se añada la fuerza de la coacción que asegura el respeto a la ley, pero el fin último sigue siendo sumar los pode… - Benedictus de Spinoza

Although proclaiming Spinoza the chief and most prominent ‘representative’ of the underground atheistic tradition supposedly striving to undermine the main structures of authority underpinning Christendom has an astoundingly long history, from 1673 when we first encounter this notion that Spinozism was a forbidden philosophy being promoted, first in Holland, by an underground sect of disciples, called ‘spinozistes’, continuing down to the 1820s, roughly lasting a century and a half, modern historians took very little interest in this striking phenomenon until the question became tied to the (since 2001) highly divisive issue of ‘Radical Enlightenment’. The remarkable historiographical and philosophical controversy over the role of Spinoza and Spinozism in the Western Enlightenment generally sparked by the debate over ‘Radical Enlightenment’ since 2001, instead of receding after some years, as one might expect from the normal course of historiographical controversies, has been escalating for more than a decade now especially since 2009, in a dramatic fashion.

كُلَّما زاد الخيال قلَّ الاستعداد لمعرفة الأشياء بالذِّهن الخاص، وعلى العكس من ذلك نَجِد أن مَن يَتفوَّقون في الذهن ويحرِصون على تنميته تكون قُدرتُهم على التَّخيُّل أكثر اعتدالًا وأقلَّ انطلاقًا

Meum institutum non est verborum significationem sed rerum naturam explicare