Spinoza and the second battle against the scholastic: in the thread of a book by Yirmiyahu Yovel

The following article was presented in a shorter version for the International Seminar "The marrano sources of Spinoza's Political Thought", (Murcia, May 30th- 31th 2008). I proposed there some theoretical and methodological problems in the first volume of The Marrano of Reason, by Yirmiyahu Yovel. There is a hermeneutical violence in his continuous insistence on identitary issues - as a significant point of departure to analyze Spinoza's thought-that blurs its coherence from the point of view of the History of Ideas. This coherence does not appear in the main Histories of Renaissance Political Thought either, perpetuating Spinoza's image as an ahistorical and systematic thinker. I will reassess Yovel ' s point of view, superposing on the identitary logic of his narrative a historical and systematic logic drawn from Renaissance civic philosophy, advancing some of the conclusions to be found in my upcoming book: The Renaissance conversational turn.