Steven Nadler: "Caute: Reflections on Spinoza’s Virtue”

"Caute: Reflections on Spinoza’s Virtue”It is well known that Spinoza’s personal motto was caute, be cautious. And it seems that he himself followed this injunction in his life. But what about “the free person [homo liber]”, the superbly rational individual who is the moral model of human nature that, Spinoza argues in the Ethics, we naturally strive under the guidance of reason to become? Should we count caution, along with honesty, benevolence, and other traits, among the virtues of the free person?

Steven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His 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; 2^nd ed. 2018); Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam (Yale, “Jewish Lives” series, 2018); and, most recently, Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die (Princeton, 2020). 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). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.