Steven Nadler

Biography

Becoming Spinoza: The Making of a Philosopher I am currently working on two projects: a biography of Menasseh ben Israel (1604-1657), a rabbi in the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish community and arguably the most famous Jew in seventeenth-century Europe, for the “Jewish Lives” series (Yale University Press); and a book tentatively titled Becoming Spinoza: The Making of a Philosopher, a study of the various contexts — Cartesian, Stoic, Jewish, Hobbesian, Dutch Republican — in which Spinoza’s philosophy developed. Steven Nadler is the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy and the Evjue-Bascom Professor in Humanities at UW–Madison, where he has been teaching since 1988. He specializes in the history of early modern philosophy (especially the seventeenth century) and in medieval Jewish philosophy. His books include Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge, 1999, winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award); Rembrandt’s Jews (Chicago, 2003, named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize); The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2008); A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton, 2011); and The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes (Princeton, 2013).