Chair, Department of Philosophy
William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy
Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Most of my research since receiving a Ph.D. (Columbia, 1986) has been devoted to the study of philosophy in the seventeenth century. My main interests include Descartes and Cartesian philosophy, Spinoza, and Leibniz. I have also examined antecedents of aspects of early modern thought in medieval Latin philosophy and (especially with respect to Spinoza) medieval Jewish philosophy.
The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil will be published this fall (2008) by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The book is about Leibniz, Arnauld and Malebranche (with cameo appearances by Descartes and Spinoza) and the seventeenth-century debate over theodicy and the proper conception of God.
My current book projects are "A Book Forged in Hell": Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise (for Princeton University Press); and Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed: An Introduction (for Cambridge University Press).
I have been teaching at the UW-Madison since 1988. I have also been visiting professor of philosophy at Stanford University, the University of Chicago, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris), and the University of Amsterdam, where I held the Spinoza Chair in 2007.
These are among the undergraduate courses I regularly teach:
Philosophy 101: Introduction to Philosophy
Philosophy 104: Good, Beauty, and the Meaning of Life
Philosophy 432: History of Modern Philosophy
Philosophy 435: Jewish Philosophy from Antiquity through the Seventeenth Century
My graduate seminars tend to be devoted to individual philosophers in the seventeenth century (especially Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz) and to specific philosophical problems as these get worked out among seventeenth-century thinkers (“Causation in Early Modern Philosophy”, “Ideas and Representation in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy”, “The Problem of Evil in Early Modern Philosophy”). I have also offered seminars in medieval Jewish philosophy ("Rationalism in Medieval Jewish Philosophy: Saadya, Maimonides, Gersonides").
Ironman Triathlon Results
2004: 14:31:04
2006: 14:05:37
"Necessarily Eternal: A Catablog of (All) Things Spinoza"
Centre d'études cartésiennes (Paris)
Cartesius.Net (Italy)
Spinoza and Judaism conference (UW-Madison, October 1999)
Department of Philosophy
University of Wisconsin-Madison
5185 Helen C. White Hall
600 North Park St.
Madison, WI 53706
608.263.3741
FAX 608.265.3701
smnadler@wisc.edu