Vittorio Morfino's Il tempo e l’occasione: l’incontro Spinoza-Machiavelli constitutes a decisive intervention for contemporary studies of Spinoza. Owing in part to Spinoza's apparent paucity of references to Machiavelli, Spinoza's relation to him has often implicitly been treated as occasional: perhaps the two share some affinities for realist or anti-utopian political positions, with Spinoza taking up certain Machiavellian or Machiavellian-like insights, but the relation does not go beyond this point. This book challenges such assumptions by demonstrating a connection between Spinoza and Machiavelli as specific as it is pervasive, arguing that Spinoza's understanding of causality in the Ethics owes much to his study of Machiavelli's writings on history and politics, a claim with multiple implications for Spinoza's own views on history and politics as well as temporality. Morfino succinctly treats different approaches to the Spinoza–Machiavelli question in the introduction, and I will not rehearse them here. Instead, I will briefly recapitulate the main steps in his overall analysis in order to frame it in terms of the object alluded to in the title of the book – Spinoza's encounter with Machiavelli.

After synthetically summarising different approaches to the Spinoza– Machiavelli question throughout the twentieth century in the introduction, Morfino proceeds to carry out four steps in the remainder of the text. First, in chapter 1, through close examination of Spinoza's own library, Morfino delivers a clear and thorough framework of the possible means through which Spinoza read Machiavelli. His analysis shows that Spinoza had multiple access points to the Florentine's work: Machiavelli's complete works in Italian (which Spinoza seemed capable of understanding, given the presence of an Italian–Spanish dictionary in his library, as well as an Italian-language monograph), a Latin translation of The Prince, and discussions of Machiavelli in texts of Bacon, Descartes and others. Morfino is careful to note that these basic facts, of course, do not necessarily mean that Spinoza studied Machiavelli in these ways, or only in these ways, since such information cannot speak to the practical aspects of reading or other kinds of study. As such, in addition to his detailed account of these possible means, Morfino outlines Spinoza's general approach to citation, where proper names are rare, and together with impersonal figures (such as the ‘theologians and metaphysicians’ in the appendix to Ethics I), negative, except for a remark about ancient atomists in a letter to Hugo Boxel.