TEACHING

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").