This article is part of The Return of Metaphysics series, and was produced in partnership with the Essentia Foundation.

Spinoza is having a moment. Previously dismissed as a speculative metaphysician, his metaphysical monism has been rehabilitated even in analytic-dominated Anglophone philosophy. But it’s his challenge to humanism and its commitment to human exceptionalism that’s most relevant today, and the hardest to accept, argues Yitzhak Y. Melamed.

A few years ago, I took part in a conference at Bochum University, and partly out of respect for the university which hosts the illustrious Hegel-Archiev, I decided to present a paper in which I argued that, not unlike Hegel’s Encyclopedie, one can profitably read Spinoza’s Ethics as a circular text which ends just where it begins. The Q&A session after my talk was lively and joyous, but one specific question still resonates with me. “This was an interesting talk. Still, if I may. What is the point of engaging again with Spinoza’s metaphysics? Has not Kant already proved that dogmatic metaphysic is obsolete?” asked one of the participants, a senior Kant scholar and philologist. Since the question was genuinely well-meant and fair, I asked the scholar whether he would mind repeating Kant’s proof, so that we could consider it jointly. At which point I was rewarded with a warm, generous, smile followed by a hand gesture which I interpreted as indicating certain desperateness or recognition that some “dogmatic” philosophers are just incorrigible.