Steven Nadler
Department of Philosophy

5185 Helen C. White Hall
University of Wisconsin - Madison
Madison, WI 53706

(608)263-3741
smnadler@wisc.edu

Education:

• 1986 Ph.D., Philosophy, Columbia University, New York. Dissertation: "Perception, Knowledge and Intentionality in Arnauld: A Study in the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas."
• 1981 M.A., Philosophy, Columbia University.
• 1976-80 B.A., cum laude, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri. Major: Philosophy.
  Area of Specialization: Early Modern Philosophy.
  Areas of Competence: Metaphysics; Moral Philosophy; Ancient and Medieval Philosophy; Jewish Philosophy.

Professional Positions and Activities:

University:

• Professor of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin - Madison (tenured, 1992; full professor, 1998).
• Director, The Center for the Humanities, University of Wisconsin - Madison (spring 1999 - present ).
• Executive Committee, Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, University of Wisconsin - Madison.

Profession:

• Co-editor (with Daniel Garber), Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy (annual volume).
• Editor (for North America), Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 1995-2000.
• Editorial Board, Journal of the History of Philosophy.
• Board of Editors, Journal of the History of Ideas.
• General Editor, AGreat Minds@ series, Blackwell Publishers.
• Steering Committee, Midwest Seminar in the History of Early Modern Philosophy.
• Permanent Member, Centre d'études Cartésiennes (Sorbonne).
• Member of American Philosophical Association (Central Division).
• Member of the Association for Jewish Studies.
• APA Central Division Program Committee, 2000-2001.
• Awards referee, National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Stipends, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003; National Humanities Center, 1998.

Conferences Organized (at the University of Wisconsin - Madison):

• Causation in Early Modern Philosophy (May 1989)
• Spinoza and Judaism (October 1999)
• Co-editor, special issue devoted to Spinoza and the Jewish Tradition of Studia Spinozana.

Selected Publications:

Books authored:

• Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (Oxford University Press, 2002).
• Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Winner of the 2000 Koret Jewish Book Award. Translations in French, Dutch, Italian, Polish, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish.
• Malebranche and Ideas (Oxford University Press, 1992).
• Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas (Princeton University Press, 1989).

In progress:

• Occasionalism: Causation Among the Cartesians (under contract with Oxford University Press)
• Reason and Happiness: Spinoza and the Transformation of Jewish Rationalism

Books edited:

• A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy (Blackwell Publishers, 2002).
• The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
• Causation in Early Modern Philosophy, with introduction (Penn State Press, 1993).
• Malebranche: Philosophical Selections, with introduction (Hackett Publishing, 1992).

Articles in the last five years:

• Descartes' Soul, Spinoza's Mind, in Receptions of Descartes, ed. Tad Schmaltz (Routledge, forthcoming).
• Spinoza and the Politics of Hope and Fear, in Analytic Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, ed. Tom Sorrell (forthcoming).
• Descartes, Cartesianism, and Spinoza articles for the Dictionary of Early Modern Europe, ed. Jonathan Dewald (New York: Scribners, forthcoming).
• Louis de la Forge, for the Thoemmes Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (London: Thoemmes, forthcoming).
• Spinoza and the Naturalization of Judaism, in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy, ed. Michael Morgan (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
• Is Spinoza a Jewish Philosopher?, Studia Spinozana (forthcoming).
• The Bible Hermeneutics of Baruch de Spinoza, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, Magne Saebo, Michael Fishbane, Jean-Louis Ska, eds. (Gottingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, forthcoming).
• Spinoza and Philo: On the Alleged Mysticism in the Ethics, in B. Inwood and J. Miller, eds., Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
• Eternity and Immortality in Spinoza's Ethics, invited for Midwest Studies in Philosophy, ed. Peter French and Howard Wettstein, vol. 26 (2002).
• Spinoza, in Steven Nadler, ed., A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy (Blackwell Publishers, 2002).
• Baruch de Spinoza, in Edward Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza/).
• Gersonides on Providence: A Jewish Chapter in the History of General Will, Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (2001): 37-57.
• Spinoza in the Garden of Good and Evil, in Elmar Kremer, ed., The Problem of Evil in Early Modern Philosophy (University of Toronto Press, 2001). Published as Spinoza et le problème juif de la théodicée, Philosophiques 29 (2002).
• Malebranche, for The Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2nd edition, ed. Lawrence Becker (Routledge, 2001).
• The Excommunication of Spinoza: Trouble and Toleration in the Dutch Jerusalem, Shofar 19 (2001): 40-52.
• Baruch Spinoza: Lense Grinder, Heretic, invited essay for the Journal of Opthamology, October 2000.
• Nicolas Malebranche, for The Blackwell Guide to Modern Philosophy: Descartes to Nietszche, ed. Steven Emmanuel (Blackwell Publishers, 2000).
• "Antoine Arnauld", in The Encyclopedia of the Scientific Revolution (Garland Publishing, 2000).
• Connaissance et causalité: Esquisse d'une histoire, XVIIième Siècle 51 (1999), 335-45.
• Knowledge, Volitional Agency and Causation in Malebranche and Geulincx, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7 (1999), 263-274..
• Continuous Creation and the Activity of the Soul: Louis de la Forge and the Development of Occasionalism, Journal of the History of Philosophy 36 (1998): 215-231.
• "Conceptions of Causality and Explanation", invited essay for The Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Philosophy, M. Ayers, D. Garber, and A. Gabbey, eds. (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
• Articles on Antoine Arnauld, Nicolas Malebranche, Louis de la Forge, Géraud Cordemoy, and Simon Foucher, for the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Routledge, 1998).
• Descartes' Demon and the Madness of Don Quixote, Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997), 41-55. A French version appears in Laval théologique et philosophique 53 (1997), 605-616.

FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS AND AWARDS

• National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Stipend, 2001.
• Kellett Midcareer Award, University of Wisconsin-Madison, awarded in 2000-2001 ($60,000 research award).
• 2000 Koret Jewish Book Award, in the category of Biography, for Spinoza: A Life.
• 1995 Selma V. Forkasch Prize for best article published in the Journal of the History of Ideas in 1994 (awarded for "Choosing a Theodicy: The Leibniz-Arnauld-Malebranche Connection").
• Romnes Research Fellowship, University of Wisconsin, awarded 1995 ($40,000 research award).
• Weinstein Course Development Research Award, Jewish Studies Program, University of Wisconsin - Madison, May 1994.
• National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Stipend, 1994.
• Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin - Madison (Fall, 1991).
• National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Stipend, 1988.
• Council for Philosophic Studies/National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Institute on Early Modern Philosophy, Brown Unviversity, 1988.
• Summer Research Grants, Graduate School Research Committee, University of Wisconsin - Madison: 1989, 1990, 1991, 1995, 1999.

COURSES TAUGHT
The following are samples of courses taught at various levels:

• Graduate seminars on Descartes; Spinoza; Leibniz; Seventeenth Century Empiricism; Maimonides; Leibniz, Arnauld and Malebranche; Medieval Jewish Philosophy; Locke; Problems in Cartesian Natural Philosophy; Kant.
• Undergraduate courses: Introduction to Philosophy; History of Modern Philosophy; Jewish Philosophy from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century; Philosophy and Literature; Existentialism; Locke and Leibniz; Rationalism.