Justin Steinberg (Cornell University)

I am a Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University (since July 2024). Before this, I was a Professor of Philosophy at CUNY. 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. My article “Spinoza on Civil Liberation” received the Journal of the History of Philosophy prize for best article of 2009, and my article “Affect, Desire, and Judgement in Spinoza’s Account of Motivation” was named runner up for the 2016 Rogers prize awarded to the best article in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy.

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