Op 7 november 2014 gaf Susan James in de London lecture series van het Royal Institute of Philosophy die in het seizoen 2014-2015 vooral gaan over de geschiedenis van de filosofie, haar lezing die al de dag erna op YouTube gepubliceerd werd:
Susan James: Why Should We Read Spinoza?
"During the twentieth century, Spinoza was allotted a minor role in Anglophone histories of philosophy. Dwarfed by Descartes, Hobbes, Locke and Leibniz, he was widely regarded as an eccentric loner. Recently, however, he has come to be seen as a philosopher of broad contemporary relevance. He has been read as a religious pluralist, a radical democrat, an early defender of dual aspect monism, a metaphysical holist whose ideas anticipate the concerns of contemporary ecologists, and as nothing less than the founder of the Enlightenment. In this lecture I shall ask what this interpretative turnaround tells us about the way we do the history of philosophy. What are we looking for when we study philosophy’s past? And why should we read Spinoza?"
