Steven Nadler

Steven Nadler is an internationally recognized scholar of early modern philosophy. His publications include Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge, 1999; second edition, 2018; winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award); The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2008); The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: From Antiquity through the Seventeenth Century (2009), co-edited with Tamar Rudavsky; A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton, 2011); The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes (Princeton, 2013); Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam (Yale, 2018), and Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die (Princeton, 2020). His book Rembrandt's Jews (Chicago, 2003) was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has held visiting professorships at the University of Amsterdam, the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris), Stanford University, and the University of Chicago, and was Scholar-in-Residence at the American Academy in Rome. He has served as president of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division, and as the editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy. He is currently serving as director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research in the Humanities.