Spinoza, reader of Leo the Hebrew: a study about the Short Treatise

This philosophical work has as a scope to make explicit the influence of the renaissance author Leo the Hebrew, based on the work Dialoghi d\'amore, upon the 17th century thinker Spinoza, particularly the concept of love and its relation with knowledge in the Short Treatise, Spinozian work that outlines, even if minimally, the structure that will be later solidified in the Ethics. The relation between these two authors, besides the problem of the nature of love as passion and beatitude, implicates also to recognize the change between two distinct philosophical ethoses: Renaissance and Modernity. If a renaissance thinker influences a modern one, the negation of its predecessor by moderns cannot be, though, an annihilating critique, able to delete all the remnants of a supposedly outdated way of thinking. Therefore the inquiry: what is there of modern in Renaissance and what is there of renaissance in Modernity? The resolution of this bi-dimensional question justifies the short passage through the Cartesian thought and the proposition of the philosophical concept of reader as one of the distinctive features of the foundation of modern philosophy. The modern thinker seems to be, first of all, a reader, a good one, or in terms of Spinoza: the philosopher-reader. (AU)