Steven Nadler is the William H Hay II Professor of Philosophy and the Evjue-Bascom Professor in Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His books include Spinoza: A Life (1999), A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (2011), and The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes (2013).