Shifting the Geography of Reason, with Respects to Spinoza

Abstract

Abstract: This essay is based on a portion of the author’s Spinoza Lecture, which was presented in Amsterdam on 24 May 2022. Although Spinoza is not the main subject of the lecture, his anxieties and fears about his Sephardic Jewishness and its links to Africa and by extension racialized blackness offer an opportunity to outline Euromodern hegemonic geography of reason as a misrepresentation from which a shift in point of view can offer a set of important challenges to the portrait of philosophy it promotes. These challenges are elaborated through the author’s summary of Africana and Black philosophy and the questions that philosophy, understood in intellectual, historical, and political terms, generates. Among these are the meanings of humanity, freedom, justification, redemption, reality, political transformation, and love.