Spinoza: A Life

Steven Nadler is a historian of philosophy, and this Cambridge University Press book is his scholarly biography of Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth century philosopher excommunicated from Amsterdam's Jewish community. Its strength is that it is a peer informed academic biography from a major university press by a recognized specialist in early modern philosophy, grounding Spinoza's life in the documented social and religious world of his community. Its limit is that a biography necessarily foregrounds Spinoza's life and its context over sustained technical exposition of his philosophical system, so a claim needing deep analysis of a specific argument in the Ethics needs a source focused on that philosophical content.