Spinoza Circles
A series of readings and artistic encounters

Fee:
6,- euro (incl. coffee)
Please note: all sessions are conducted in English.

Schedule of each Circle:
14:00 – 14:10 welcome and coffee
14:10 – 14:30 introduction with Baruch Gottlieb
14:30 – 15:30 reading together
16:30 – 16:00 open discussion
16:00 close

Location
West Den Haag, Lange Voorhout 102, Den Haag

Make resvervations
Saturday 27.06.2026: Being Human
Saturday 29.08.2026: Deus sive Natura / God or Nature
Saturday 31.10.2026: The Ethics of the Ethics
Saturday 27.02.2027: State, Religion and Individual
Saturday 24.04.2027: Friends and Others
Saturday 26.06.2027: Universality


Have you ever read Spinoza? Have you ever wanted to read the work but got frustrated after a few pages? How about reading Spinoza together? The idea was to try to span and feel out the temporal gap between Spinoza’s thinking from 350 years ago and how it resonates with us today. The strategy was to use our voices to read aloud in the space connecting our bodies with the built environment in much the same way that people did during Spinoza's time. The continuity between word, meaning, voices and bodies, help us understand physically as much as mentally what persists and what has changed since Spinoza was writing his immortal texts.

In preparation for events commemorating the 350’s anniversary of his death in 2027, in this new series of Spinoza Circles, we read Spinoza together and examine how his thinking can help us address some of the concerns we have today about technological change and its social and political ramifications. Through our readings we will explore how many of today’s concerns were nascent in Spinoza’s time, and how the fledgling nation-state of The Netherlands, a prototype for the liberal democracies many of us live in today, was formulated as a rationalist solution.

Necessarily we will need to contextualize the hopefulness of Spinoza’s ethical imperatives with the commercial colonialism which undergirded the civil sphere in the nascent secular state that Spinoza helped conceptualize, the trade-off between violence, inhumanity and brutal extraction and exploitation abroad with the generalised, radically democratised human principles at home. Unexceptionally for his time, Spinoza speaks to a universalised subject without gender race or class. However, considering that even today women are still struggling for satisfactory political agency, we need to re-examine Spinoza’s hopeful concept of universal rationality, and discuss to what degree Spinoza’s insights can be applied for general emancipation.

The Spinoza Circles is a reading group open to all interested in discussing together regardless of background or experience with philosophy. Texts to be discussed will be distributed in advance to all registered participants, participants will be encouraged to read parts of these aloud and discuss them together. We will do some experiments in translating our understanding of Spinoza’s thinking into other media and we will do exercises applying insights from our discussions to reflections on exhibitions going on at West. Each session will meet for two hours every two months in hybrid mode, both at West Den Haag and online.

Registration for a Circle session will include admittance to the exhibitions. For more information, do not hesitate to contact us with and questions or ideas.