• Spinoza, Descartes, and the "stupid Cartesians"
    In Steven Nadler, Tad M. Schmaltz & Delphine Antoine-Mahut (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism, Oxford University Press. 2019.
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    In this book the philosophers Steve Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro will explain why bad thinking happens to good people. Why is it, they ask, that so large a segment of public can go so wrong in both how they come to form the opinions they do and how they fail to appreciate the moral consequences of acting on them. Their diagnosis of the current state of affairs in America, at least, is this: a significant proportion of the population is stupid. They intend this not as mere name-calling, but a diag…Read more
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    The Many Lives of René Descartes
    Journal of the History of Ideas 83 (3): 501-522. 2022.
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    Three general accounts of causation stand out in early modern philosophy: Cartesian interactionism, occasionalism, and Leibniz's preestablished harmony. The contributors to this volume examine these theories in their philosophical and historical context. They address them both as a means for answering specific questions regarding causal relations and in their relation to one another, in particular, comparing occasionalism and the preestablished harmony as responses to Descartes's metaphysics and…Read more
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    Three general accounts of causation stand out in early modern philosophy: Cartesian interactionism, occasionalism, and Leibniz's preestablished harmony. The contributors to this volume examine these theories in their philosophical and historical context. They address them both as a means for answering specific questions regarding causal relations and in their relation to one another, in particular, comparing occasionalism and the preestablished harmony as responses to Descartes's metaphysics and…Read more
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    The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2019.
    The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism comprises fifty specially written chapters on Rene Descartes and Cartesianism, the dominant paradigm for philosophy and science in the seventeenth century, written by an international group of leading scholars of early modern philosophy. The first part focuses on the various aspects of Descartes's biography and philosophy, with chapters on his epistemology, method, metaphysics, physics, mathematics, moral philosophy, political thought, medical th…Read more
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    Snapshot: Spinoza’s Bookshelf
    The Philosophers' Magazine 94 40-44. 2021.
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    Œuvres vol. IV: Ethica/Éthique by Baruch Spinoza
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 59 (3): 515-517. 2021.
    The world of Spinoza scholarship has seen a number of remarkable achievements in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. There was the publication of an expanded, two-volume edition of Jakob Freudenthal's Die Lebensgeschichte Spinozas by Manfred Walther and Michael Czelinski in 2006, an indispensable resource for documents related to Spinoza's life and writings. Then there was the stunning discovery by Leen Spruit in 2010 of a manuscript of Spinoza's Ethics in the Vatican Library—the …Read more
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    European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.
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    Two New Documents on Spinoza's Biography
    with Ton Tielen and Victor Tiribás
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 58 (4): 803-812. 2020.
    remarkable as it may seem, we are still, nearly 350 years after Spinoza's death, uncovering new information about the philosopher's life. Previously unknown, or at least unnoticed, documents bearing facts about his years before the 1656 herem and about his parents and other relatives continue to emerge from the archives, especially concerning their communal, business, and religious activities in Portugal, France, and the Netherlands.In this article, we present two such documents, one from the Po…Read more
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    From Pulitzer Prize-finalist Steven Nadler, an engaging guide to what Spinoza can teach us about life’s big questions In 1656, after being excommunicated from Amsterdam’s Portuguese-Jewish community for “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds,” the young Baruch Spinoza abandoned his family’s import business to dedicate his life to philosophy. He quickly became notorious across Europe for his views on God, the Bible, and miracles, as well as for his uncompromising defense of free thought. Yet …Read more
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    One of the more difficult tasks that Clerselier faced in bringing out his 1664 edition of the Traité de l'homme was securing the illustrations, eventually composed by La Forge and Gutschoven. After considering the chronology of this frustrating process, which is interesting in its own right, I will examine the illustrations themselves, comparing them with Schuyl’s illustrations for his 1662 Latin edition, and especially in the light of what Clerselier says were the intended purpose of such illus…Read more
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    The story of one of the most important—and incendiary—books in Western history When it appeared in 1670, Baruch Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise was denounced as the most dangerous book ever published—"godless," "full of abominations," "a book forged in hell... by the devil himself." Religious and secular authorities saw it as a threat to faith, social and political harmony, and everyday morality, and its author was almost universally regarded as a religious subversive and political radi…Read more
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    The story of one of the most important—and incendiary—books in Western history When it appeared in 1670, Baruch Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise was denounced as the most dangerous book ever published—"godless," "full of abominations," "a book forged in hell... by the devil himself." Religious and secular authorities saw it as a threat to faith, social and political harmony, and everyday morality, and its author was almost universally regarded as a religious subversive and political radi…Read more
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    Spinoza: A Life
    Cambridge University Press. 1999.
    Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was one of the most important philosophers of all time; he was also arguably the most radical and controversial. This is the first complete biography of Spinoza in any language and is based on detailed archival research. More than simply recounting the story of Spinoza's life, the book takes the reader right into the heart of Jewish Amsterdam in the seventeenth century and, with Spinoza's exile from Judaism, right into the midst of the tumultuous political, social, int…Read more
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    Richard A. "Red" Watson, 1930–2019
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 58 (1). 2020.
    On September 18, 2019, the Cartesian scholar Richard A. Watson, known to his family, friends, and colleagues as "Red," passed away at the age of 88.watson was born in 1930 in new market, Iowa, where he met his wife Patty Jo in middle school. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Iowa, studying under Richard H. Popkin. After a brief stint teaching at the University of Michigan, Watson spent most of his career at Washington University in St. Louis, where Popkin also joined …Read more
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    Spinoza: philosophe grammairien ed. by Jean Baumgarten, Irène Rosier-Catach, and Pina Totaro
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 57 (4): 756-758. 2019.
    Spinoza's Compendium of Hebrew Grammar has not been well served by scholarship. Serious studies of it are few and far between, and it has generally been ignored by philosophers, including seasoned Spinoza scholars. In fact, I am willing to bet that most people would be surprised to learn that Spinoza wrote a Hebrew grammar.Even Spinoza's closest friends did not know what to make of this work, composed most likely in the early 1670s, just after the publication of the Theological-Political Treatis…Read more
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    Spinoza and Menasseh ben Israel: Facts and Fictions
    Journal of the History of Ideas 80 (4): 533-554. 2019.
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    Reconceiving Spinoza by Samuel Newlands
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 57 (2): 346-347. 2019.
    In 1969, Edwin Curley published his Spinoza's Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation. It was a groundbreaking book in which Curley offers a bold and original account of Spinoza's metaphysical theses. In his highly unorthodox but hugely influential reading, he tries to mitigate some of the ontological oddity of Spinoza's claims that "whatever is, is in God," that "from God infinite things follow in infinite ways," and that mind and body are "one and the same thing," by giving them a strictly cau…Read more
  • The first volume in this comprehensive work is an exploration of the history of Jewish philosophy from its beginnings in antiquity to the early modern period, with a particular emphasis on medieval Jewish thought. Unlike most histories, encyclopedias, guides, or companions of Jewish philosophy, this volume is organized by philosophical topic rather than by chronology or individual figures. There are sections on logic and language; natural philosophy; epistemology, philosophy of mind, and psychol…Read more
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    Descartes, Malebranche, and the Crisis of Perception by Walter Ott
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 56 (1): 175-176. 2018.
    This is a short book on a small topic with big ramifications. I call it a small topic because Descartes's account of perception occupies only a corner of his overall philosophical project, which is dominated by his concern to provide a solid metaphysical and epistemological grounding for his science. At the same time, Ott's discussion of sense perception in Descartes comes part and parcel with an account of the theory of ideas in Descartes and later Cartesians, a theory of how to read the Medita…Read more
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    Aliquid remanet: What Are We to Do with Spinoza's Compendium of Hebrew Grammar?
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 56 (1): 155-167. 2018.
    Good things come to those who wait. In this case, the waiting period was just a bit shy of the amount of time that the ancient Israelites had to spend in the desert before entering the Promised Land. But now, over thirty years after the appearance of the first volume of Edwin Curley's English edition of the "collected works" of Spinoza—and almost fifty years since the signing of the original contract with Princeton University Press—we have been magnificently rewarded. Volume 2 is, like its prede…Read more
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    Heretics!: The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy (edited book)
    with Ben Nadler
    Princeton University Press. 2017.
    An entertaining, enlightening, and humorous graphic narrative of the dangerous thinkers who laid the foundation of modern thought This entertaining and enlightening graphic narrative tells the exciting story of the seventeenth-century thinkers who challenged authority—sometimes risking excommunication, prison, and even death—to lay the foundations of modern philosophy and science and help usher in a new world. With masterful storytelling and color illustrations, Heretics! offers a unique introdu…Read more
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    Paris 1675
    with Ben Nadler
    In Ben Nadler & Steven Nadler (eds.), Heretics!: The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy, Princeton University Press. pp. 106-120. 2017.
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    Cambridge and London 1650
    with Ben Nadler
    In Ben Nadler & Steven Nadler (eds.), Heretics!: The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy, Princeton University Press. pp. 100-105. 2017.
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    London 1703
    with Ben Nadler
    In Ben Nadler & Steven Nadler (eds.), Heretics!: The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy, Princeton University Press. pp. 160-173. 2017.
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    Frontmatter
    with Ben Nadler
    In Ben Nadler & Steven Nadler (eds.), Heretics!: The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy, Princeton University Press. pp. 1-2. 2017.
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    Introduction
    with Ben Nadler
    In Ben Nadler & Steven Nadler (eds.), Heretics!: The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy, Princeton University Press. pp. 3-6. 2017.