Spinoza Sessions presents, for its third edition, a short lecture and interview with one of the Netherlands foremost Spinoza scholars, Andrea Sangiacomo from the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Thought the University of Groningen. Andrea has prepared a provocative thesis to discuss called ‘Spinoza’s Mistake’ where he examines the quest for eternal joy which Spinoza pursued from his early Emendations until the Ethics, and which he eventually identifies in the ‘intellectual love of God’. How does Spinoza distinguish desire, and love? Is beatitude forever or forever fleeting?

Please join us as we treat these questions and more in what is sure to be an invigorating and controversial episode. As usual we will be taking your question during the live stream.

The Spinoza Sessions are curated and hosted by Baruch Gottlieb as part of West Den Haag's Thuistezien program, where we explore all the ways we can engage and exchange together through the available technologies and techniques, This is a series of conversations featuring contemporary thinkers for whom Spinoza’s thinking offers some helpful insights into our contemporary condition.

Andrea Sangiacomo is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at Groningen. He’s PI of the ERC Starting Grant project ‘The Normalization of Natural Philosophy’ and former NWO-veni laureate. He’s also coordinator of the Groningen Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Thought. He devoted significant part of his research to Spinoza, from his 2010 multilingual edition of Spinoza’s Complete Works (Tutte le Opere, Bompiani, Milan) to his last two monographs: ‘L’Essenza del Corpo. Spinoza e la scienza delle composizioni (G. Olms, 2013) and Spinoza on Reason, Passions and the Supreme Good’ (Oxford UP, forthcoming in 2019), and edited collection (with Aurelia Armstrong and Keith Green) ‘Spinoza and Relational Autonomy: Being with Others’ (Edinburgh UK, 2019).