This talk will engage key dimensions of Spinoza's 'Ethics'; a select band of the work's leading critics from the past forty years (e.g., Steven B. Smith, Gilles Deleuze, Warren Montag, and Slavoj Zizek) will also be given critical coverage; as such, our chosen objects of focus will include the concepts of existence, creation and the commons for thinking our contemporaneity and some of its principal challenges and aspirations.