A unique combination of philosophy, biography, and art history. The philosopher, the priest, and the painter investigates the remarkable individuals and the circumstances behind a small portrait.

This book is the first full length biography of Spinoza written in English. In this work, the author examines the various ethnic, political, and intellectual factors that influenced Spinoza and his philosophy.

Often called the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes set the intellectual agenda for seventeenth-century philosophy, mathematics, natural science, and beyond. In this critical biography, based on compelling new research, Steven Nadler follows Descartes from his early education in France to the Dutch Republic, where he lived most of his adult life, to his final months as a tutor to Queen Christina of Sweden. Along the way, Nadler shows how Descartes renewed philosophy by transforming fundamental assumptions about the cosmos, natural world, and human nature as well as how his work continues to generate new insights into many of the metaphysical and epistemological problems that engage philosophers today.

An illuminating biography of the great Amsterdam rabbi and celebrated popularizer of Judaism in the seventeenth century Menasseh ben Israel (1604-1657) was among the most accomplished and cosmopolitan rabbis of his time, and a pivotal intellectual figure in early modern Jewish history. He was one of the three rabbis of the "Portuguese Nation" in Amsterdam, a community that quickly earned renown worldwide for its mercantile and scholarly vitality. Born in Lisbon, Menasseh and his family were forcibly converted to Catholicism but suspected of insincerity in their new faith. To avoid the horrors of the Inquisition, they fled first to southwestern France, and then to Amsterdam, where they finally settled. Menasseh played an important role during the formative decades of one of the most vital Jewish communities of early modern Europe, and was influential through his extraordinary work as a printer and his efforts on behalf of the readmission of Jews to England. In this lively biography, Steven Nadler provides a fresh perspective on this seminal figure