Samuel Newlands is William J. and Dorothy K. O'Neill Collegiate Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of numerous articles on early modern philosophy and the co-editor (with Larry Jorgensen) of Metaphysics and the Good (2009) and New Essays on Leibniz's Theodicy (2014).

• Introduction 1: The Desiderata of Perfection 2: Spinoza's Conceptualist Strategy 3: Conceptual Dependence Monism 4: Spinoza's Metaphysics of Modality 5: A Conceptualist Account of Essences 6: Elusive Individuals 7: Ethics, Motivation and Egoism 8: Moral Transformation and Self-Transcendence 9: The Nature of the Conceptual

This ambitious and stimulating book will be much discussed by Spinoza scholars, many of whom will dispute its claims. Nevertheless, this is what original scholarship in the history of philosophy is supposed to do: get us to rethink our assumptions about the philosophers we study. There is a lot in Newlands book I do not agree with, but I am very glad I read it.