Joe Gerlach, Spinoza’s Geographical Ethics – Edinburgh University Press, December 2025 (print and open access)

Examines and animates the geographical ethics of Spinoza’s philosophy

• Animated by contemporary ethical and political concerns, from the rights of nature in Ecuador to British political satire
• Harnesses conceptual innovation across geography, philosophy and the geohumanities 
• Advances the revitalisation of interest in Spinoza across contemporary human geography
• Foregrounds the geophilosophy at the heart of Spinoza’s metaphysics

Harnessing the enigmatic and radical philosophy of Dutch rationalist Baruch Spinoza, this book examines and animates the occluded geography beating at the heart of his work. Essays attending to matters of space, nature, hope, aesthetics and politics recast the Dutch rationalist in geographical terms, spotlighting Spinoza’s re-thinking and re-writing of earth and world. Advancing a renaissance in Spinozist scholarship, the book argues that Spinoza offers conceptual techniques to better apprehend and negotiate the affects and passions catalysing twenty-first century societal, environmental and political transformation. The stakes of a geographical Spinoza, for ethics, politics, ecology and thought itself, could not be higher.