Rate My Professor Heidi Ravven

Heidi M. Ravven is the Bates and Benjamin Professor of Classical and Religious Studies and Director, Professor of Jewish Studies at Hamilton College, where she joined the faculty in 1983. She earned her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Brandeis University. Ravven is a specialist on the philosophy of the seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza and was the first philosopher to propose that Spinoza anticipated central discoveries in the neuroscience of the emotions. Her research and academic interests encompass Spinoza's philosophic thought, the twelfth-century philosopher Moses Maimonides, free will and the new brain sciences, neuroethics, and Jewish ethics. She teaches courses on ancient Jewish wisdom, Spinoza’s ethics, and ethics, science, and religion.

Ravven received an unsolicited $500,000 grant from the Ford Foundation in 2004 to rethink ethics in light of the brain sciences, culminating in her book The Self Beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will, published by The New Press in 2013, with a Chinese edition by the People’s Publishing House in 2015. She co-edited Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy: A Collection of Essays with Lenn E. Goodman (SUNY Press, 2002). Selected recent publications include “Jewish Philosophy, Ethics, and the New Brain Sciences” in Jewish Philosophy for the 21st Century (Brill, 2014), lead editorial “Putting Free Will in Cultural Context and Beyond” in American Journal of Bioethics: Neuroscience (2015), and “Virtue and Freedom” in Spinoza: Basic Concepts (Imprint Academic, 2015). She has served as a member of the U.N. Sustainable Development Advisory Committee since 2014, advisor to Ambassador Prudence Bushnell for the international conference reviewing the Rwandan Genocide since 2014, and invited delegate to the BEINGS 2015 Global Summit at Emory University. Ravven was nominated for the Grawemeyer Award in Religion in 2013, received Hamilton College’s Dean’s Scholarly Achievement Award in 2014, and was appointed to the Bates and Benjamin endowed chair in 2016. She belongs to professional organizations such as the International Neuroethics Society, Association for Jewish Studies, and North American Spinoza Society.