Should every passage of the Hebrew Bible be read literally? Is the Bible a source of not just religious inspiration but historical, scientific and theological truths? These are questions on which two of the greatest Jewish philosophers ever — Maimonides and Spinoza, both arch-rationalists — disagreed. Spinoza, in fact, explicitly criticizes Maimonides over his account of the interpretation of Scripture, making a comparison of the two thinkers especially interesting.

Steven Nadler is the Vilas Research Professor and William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His books include Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die (Princeton, 2020), 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 for Biography), and Rembrandt’s Jews (Chicago, 2003, which was named a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction). He also published, with his son Ben Nadler, the graphic book Heretics! The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy (Princeton, 2017). He has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, the University of Chicago, the University of Amsterdam, the Ecole des hautes études en science sociales (Paris), and the Ecole normal supérieure (Paris). He has also been a scholar-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome. His biography of Menasseh ben Israel was published in the “Jewish Lives” series (Yale University Press) in the fall of 2018. In 2020 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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