It is the strange fate of once-prolific philosophers to be treated, as Marx lamented of Hegel and Spinoza before him, like a ‘dead dog’. Indeed, it is even stranger, but perhaps not surprising, that the major figures in what has been called a ‘revolution’, or at least a ‘renaissance’, in recent Spinoza scholarship are hardly known beyond erudite circles in their home countries. Skim through the bibliography of any major work on Spinoza in any language from the last fifty years, and one will always find the name of Alexandre Matheron, although his works have almost never been translated,and a broad appreciation of and engagement with his work is still to come in the English-speaking world. The new ‘Spinoza Studies’ series at Edinburgh University Press aims to remedy such conspicuous absences, making the work of important Spinoza scholars newly available for a wide audience. With the publication of this volume we are pleased to introduce a substantial collection of writings by the distinguished Spinoza scholar and historian of philosophy, Alexandre Matheron, to Anglophone readers for the first time.

There can be no doubt that Matheron single-handedly made some of the most significant and profound contributions to Spinoza scholarship of the past 100 years. As Laurent Bove writes, ‘Alexandre Matheron is known, by philosophers and historians of philosophy, as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, commentators on Spinoza's philosophy.’ His contributions are indeed so significant that Louis Althusser, who was slated to offer a course on Spinoza in 1971–72 for the agrégation de philosophie, decided at the last minute to lecture on Rousseau instead, explicitly imploring his students to read Matheron's massive 1969 study, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza (Individual and Community in Spinoza); as he went on to explain, Althusser felt that, after Matheron's intervention, he would have little to offer beyond summarising the book's main points. In a retrospective overview of Matheron's work written on the occasion of the publication of his most recent book, Études sur Spinoza et les philosophies de l’âge classique (Studies on Spinoza and the Philosophies of Early Modernity), which collects the vast majority of Matheron's stand-alone essays and from which the essays translated here are drawn, Ariel Suhamy, maître de conférences at the Collège de France, wrote that ‘if all Spinoza's works were to disappear from the planet, Matheron's works would happily take their place’.