The Spinoza Institute was founded in 1987 by Prof. Yirmiyahu Yovel (1935–2018) with the aim of encouraging and promoting study of the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and its sources, his personality, the intellectual history of his period, his influence on succeeding generations, and the timeliness of his philosophy in our day. The institute also initiated a public discussion of issues related to Jewish and Israeli existence, the tension between religion and state and between majority and minority, political tolerance, and Israeli identity.

In 2010 the Spinoza Institute’s activity moved to the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and it continues there as the Spinoza Center, under the direction of Prof. Pini Ifergan and Dr. Dror Yinon.

The aim of the Spinoza Center at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute is to promote international theoretical philosophical research on the philosophy of Spinoza and his contemporaries and their influence as well as research on modern European philosophy. The Spinoza Center is also committed to promoting and developing intellectual public discussion of issues concerning life in the public sphere—which it considers essential to a democratic state.

To view the lecture series at the Spinoza Center, click below:

• Humanism and Posthumanism
• Waiting for the Absolute: The Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of Hegel’s Birth
• Back to Spinoza
• Goethe: Poet, Scientist, Philosopher
• The Existentialists
• A Recurring Dispute: Spinoza in Modern German-Jewish Thought
• Thinking Now: The Philosophy of the Present
• Other Liberals
• Immanuel Kant
• Spinoza and his Readers