Franks appointed Weis Professor of Philosophy and Judaic Studies

A member of the Yale faculty since 2011, Paul Franks is a leading thinker on Jewish philosophy and pathbreaking scholar of German Idealist thinking.
Paul Franks
Paul Franks

Paul Franks, who specializes in Jewish philosophy, German Idealism, the work of Immanuel Kant, metaphysics and epistemology, and the philosophy of the human sciences, has been appointed the Robert F. and Patricia Weis Professor of Philosophy and Judaic Studies, and Professor of Religious Studies, effective immediately.

He is a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the departments of philosophy, Germanic languages and literatures, and religious studies.

Before joining the Yale faculty in 2011, Franks held the Senator Jerahmiel S. and Carole S. Grafstein Chair in Jewish Philosophy at the University of Toronto, as well as faculty positions at the University of Notre Dame and Indiana University Bloomington. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and K.U. Leuven.  He earned his B.A. and M.A. from Oxford and his Ph.D. from Harvard.

He is a leading thinker on Jewish philosophy, and a pathbreaking scholar of German Idealist thinking. His acclaimed monograph “All or Nothing: Skepticism, Transcendental Argument and Systematicity in German Idealism” (Harvard University, 2005) offers an original account of the pertinence of German Idealism to contemporary debates about philosophical naturalism and non-naturalism, while offering an explanation of German Idealist systematization projects as responses to skepticism. His co-edited translation of the writings of Franz Rosenzweig illuminates the work of this key thinker and reveals Rosenzweig to be a central contributor both to Jewish thought and to post-Kantian philosophy.  In general, Franks’s work seeks to show that there is an ongoing conversation between European philosophy and Jewish thought, a subterranean conversation that is internal to each, and that this conversation has shaped and continues to shape some of our central metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical concepts.

With more than 50 published articles to his name, as well as contributions to public-facing venues including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Franks is a prolific and highly regarded contributor to the field. Speaking engagements have taken him to institutions around the world, including Oxford University, Tel Aviv University, the University of Leipzig, Harvard, Hebrew University, and Cambridge University, and he has held fellowships and received grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He served as associate editor of the International Yearbook of German Idealism for over a decade, and is a board member of the Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of the History and Culture of German-Speaking Jewry in London, the Center for German Philosophy at the University of Chicago, and the Forschungskolleg Analytic German Idealism at the University of Leipzig.

Franks’s forthcoming books promise to broaden his reach further still. “Modernity, Critique and Kabbalah: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Philosophy from Luria to Levinas” (with Michael L. Morgan), forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, is an ambitious survey that will reveal the dynamic interaction between Jewish philosophy and modern European philosophy. “Kant’s Legacy in Metaphysics and Epistemology,” which will be published by Oxford University Press, will reassess Kant’s impact on the field.

At Yale, Franks has supervised numerous undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows.  He served as acting director of undergraduate studies in Judaic Studies in Fall 2020 and will be acting director of undergraduate studies in philosophy in 2021-22. He is also affiliated with the Department of German Languages and Literatures. He serves on the steering committee for the Judaic Studies program and plays a core role in nurturing scholarship on Jewish thought at Yale.

Share this with Facebook Share this with X Share this with LinkedIn Share this with Email Print this