Justin Steinberg 

I am a Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. I work primarily on early modern political thought and the history of ethics. While much of my published work has been on Spinoza, I have also written about Hobbes, Grotius, and Hume, among others, and I am beginning work on Émilie du Châtelet. In addition to my work in the history of philosophy, I have written more generally about empathy, humility, and the psychology of tolerance. 

I have published two books, Spinoza’s Political Psychology: The Taming of Fortune and Fear (Cambridge, 2018) and Spinoza (w/ Valtteri Viljanen) (Polity, 2020), and have edited two volumes, The Cambridge Spinoza Lexicon  (w/ Karolina Hübner) (Cambridge, 2025) and Humility: A History (Oxford Philosophical Concepts) (Oxford, 2025). My articles have appeared in such venues as Journal of the History of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Philosophers' Imprint, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Contemporary Political Theory, Ergo, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, and European Journal of Philosophy. 

I am currently working on a book about individuation and social ontology in the early-modern period. I examine the metaphysical commitments behind early modern theories of the body politic and explore the normative significance of these commitments.