Justin Steinberg (CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College)

I am a Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and Brooklyn College. My primary research interests are in the history of ethics and political thought. While much of my 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 the history of philosophy, I have also written about empathy, humility, and the psychology of tolerance, and I am currently working on a manuscript that puts Spinoza in conversation with contemporary theories of belief-formation, emotion, motivation, and agency. I received fellowship offers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Princeton University (Institute for Advanced Studies) to work on this manuscript during the 2022-2023 academic year. 

I have published two books, Spinoza’s Political Psychology: The Taming of Fortune and Fear (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Spinoza (w/ Valtteri Viljanen) (Polity, 2020), and I am currently editing two volumes that will appear in late 2023: Humility: A History (Oxford Philosophical Concepts) and The Cambridge Spinoza Lexicon  (w/ Karolina Hübner). My articles have appeared in such venues as Ergo, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Contemporary Political Theory, 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 (the same article was also nominated for the 2016 Philosopher's Annual).