Heretics! (2015)

Steven Nadler and Ben Nadler’s Heretics! The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy is something rare: a work of genuine philosophical substance delivered in the form of a graphic novel, accessible to general readers without sacrificing intellectual integrity. A philosopher father and a cartoonist son collaborate here to bring the great heretics of early modern Europe to vivid, sometimes hilarious, always illuminating life.

The book covers the period from roughly 1600 to 1750, tracking the figures — Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, and others — who broke with medieval scholasticism and laid the foundations of the modern worldview. This was dangerous work. Spinoza was excommunicated at 23; Bruno was burned at the stake; others fled, hid their manuscripts, published anonymously, or devoted their careers to dancing around church censors. The stakes of philosophical inquiry were, in this period, genuinely mortal.

Ben Nadler’s artwork is witty and expressive, deploying visual metaphor with the same precision that Steven Nadler’s text brings to philosophical argument. The portraits of these thinkers feel alive — Spinoza grinding lenses in his modest room, Descartes warming himself by a stove while his famous cogito assembles itself in thought bubbles, Hume cheerfully undermining causation over a pint. The humor never trivializes; it humanizes, which is more useful.

Steven Nadler, a preeminent scholar of early modern philosophy, writes with the authority of decades of academic work but with none of the academic apparatus that would close this book to non-specialists. His explanations of occasionalism, substance monism, empiricism, and the mind-body problem are among the clearest available anywhere.

Most valuably, the book conveys what is often lost in standard philosophical education: that these ideas were fought for, that they carried personal cost, and that the intellectual world we inhabit was built by people who risked something to build it. An essential and genuinely joyful work of philosophy for everyone.