Nicola Marcucci (Marie Curie Post-Doc Fellow, NSSR; École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris), will give a lecture entitled “History of a Sign with No Memory: Wonder, Reason, and Revelation in Spinoza”
From the abstract:
“My contribution aims to discuss an apparent paradox of Theological-Political Treatise concerning the real nature of Moses’ Revelation. Moses heard the real voice of God, or he just imagined it. Apparently, Spinoza supports both hypotheses. In this essay, I try to explain this apparent paradoxical issue of Spinoza’s conception of religion, according a central role to the notion of wonder. To do this, I try to show how Ethics’ conception of wonder allows us to distinguish two different uses of this notion in TTP: one directly connected with Moses’ revelation—and more generally with religious obedience and transmission—the other with superstition. This way, I intend to escape both a pure secularist interpretation and the theological-political critique of Spinoza’s thought, revisiting its place in the history of Enlightenment.”