Reply to Christopher Hoyt

JAN OLOF BENGTSSON, Lund University

Christopher Hoyt begins his essay with valuable summaries of some of my central historical arguments. I especially appreciate his clear understanding of my view of the relation of what I call "early personalism" to pantheism and his grasp of the point that the latter, as defined by me, "encompasses," as he puts it, "a variety of beliefs and attitudes including naturalism, materialism, atheism, and related ideas." Needless to say, it is not that all of these beliefs are strictly identical with pantheism. My argument is rather that historically, they often developed in their modern form as a consequence of what can be regarded as a "pantheistic revolution" of Western modernity, with roots deep in what has increasingly come to be summarized as the "esoteric tradition" of the West and receiving one of its most influential and characteristic expressions in the philosophy of Spinoza.