Spinoza died in January 1677. In November of that same year his Ethics came to light, included in a posthumous works package financed by his friends. The next, 1678, that work was already condemned by the Dutch government. It took more than a century for Spinoza's rescue of thought to break out, initiated by the deepest vein of German Enlightenment and Goethe's romantic neopaganism and continued by German philosophical romanticism and absolute idealism. That rescue marks a stellar moment in contemporary thought. (From the Presentation by M. Garrido)

Ethics is much more than the definition of metaphysical frameworks in alliance with a method. In Ethics there is much more. For example, there is a strange relationship between its title and its content, and not only because this "ethics" is largely metaphysical, doctrine of knowledge, general speculative physics and psychology, but because, when it is ethical, it is so a way that does not privilege man, and that may surprise today - and even inconvenience - ethical temperaments. (From Vidal Peña's Introduction)

The suspicion of utopian drifts marks the birth of modern ethics and politics, on the slogan launched by Machiavelli: "know the time and order of things and accommodate them." To this call for disillusioned caution, the seventeenth century will have to give concept. Is an ethic thinkable that conforms to the sole demands of reason? And a policy? Such, the stake whose entity Spinoza will draw at the beginning of that unfinished extension of the Ethics that the Political Treaty wanted to be. "If human nature were arranged in the proper way to make men live under the sole rule of reason, without tending to anything else, then the right of nature would be determined only by the power of reason. But ... »(From the Epilogue by Gabriel Albiac)