Steven Nadler

Professor Nadler’s research focuses on philosophy in the seventeenth century. He has written extensively on Descartes and Cartesianism, Spinoza, and Leibniz. He also works on medieval and early modern Jewish philosophy. His publications include Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge, 1999; second edition, 2018); The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2008; paperback, Princeton 2010); 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); Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die (Princeton, 2020); René Descartes: The Renewal of Philosophy (Reaktion Books, “Renaissance Lives” series, 2023); and The Good Cartesian: Louis de La Forge and the Rise of Philosophical Paradigm (Oxford, 2024). Heretics: The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy (Princeton University Press), a graphic book (with his son Ben Nadler), was published in 2017. He has two new books forthcoming in 2026: Why Read Maimondes Today? will be published by Cambridge, and Spinoza, Atheist will be published by Princeton. He is also co-editor (with Tamar Rudavsky) of The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: From Antiquity through the Seventeenth Century (2009), and (with Tad Schmaltz and Delphine Antoine-Mahut)The Oxford Handbook to Descartes and Cartesianism (2019), among other volumes. 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 in 2015 was Scholar-in-Residence at the American Academy in Rome. From 2010 to 2015 he was the editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy. He is currently  director of UW-Madison’s Institute for Research in the Humanities. In 2020, he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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