Steven Nadler (BA, Washington University, 1980; PhD, Columbia University, 1986) is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy  at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also currently the director of the UW-Madison's Institute for Research in the Humanities. His recent books include 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); Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge, 1999; 2nd ed. 2018, winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award); Spinoza's Ethics: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2006); Occasionalism: Causation Among the Cartesians (Oxford, 2010); The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God and Evil (Princeton, 2010); Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam (Yale, “Jewish Lives” series, 2018); and Rembrandt's Jews (Chicago, 2003). He is also the author, with his son Ben Nadler, of the graphic book Heretics! The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy (Princeton, 2017). His latest books are Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die (Princeton, 2020) and When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us From Ourselves, co-authored with Larry Shapiro (Princeton, 2020). He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist (for Rembrandt's Jews), and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.