Uiteraard valt ook de naam van Spinoza, maar toch vooral in een kritische opmerking over het project van Jonathan Israel:
"Jonathan Israel reduced all of those influences into an Ideengeschichte centered on the intellectual legacy of Spinoza and he excluded any significant English or French component. Since then the exclusion has deepened and also acquired a polemical edge.
If I think that Israel's simplification of the way intellectual influence and human agency work – an idealist rendering that also effaces the political – will not stand up under scrutiny, so too I think aspects of my own youthful thinking are in need of a reformulation."
[Foto: uitsnede uit een foto van Rutger van Loo]