Amor Dei intellectualis e senso del demonico. Archeologia e anatomia dell’affettività panteista

The paper tries to analyze that kind of emotion that Spinoza calls “Amor Dei intellectualis” (“Intellectual Love for God”), tracing its roots in two ancient sources (Plato and Aristotle), trying to identify the kind of feeling and emotion to which Spinoza refers, and finally trying to evaluate the availability of this notion to the landscape of nowadays philosophy of mind and ontology. The last section tries to show, through the analysis of a text by an atheist poet as Leopardi, that a pantheist sensibility can appear also in authors who do not openly endorse a pantheistic philosophy.