Michael A. Rosenthal

Michael A. Rosenthal was Professor of Philosophy and the Samuel and Althea Stroum Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Washington.  He is currently the Graftstein Professor of Jewish Philosophy at the University of Toronto.  He received his bachelors degree from Stanford University and both his masters and doctorate degrees in philosophy from the University of Chicago. Before arriving in Seattle, he taught at Grinnell College in Iowa. He teaches and publishes in the areas of early modern philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, and Jewish philosophy. He is also interested in modern German philosophy and culture and held an adjunct appointment in the Department of Germanics while at the UW.  He served as Chair of the Department of Philosophy from 2011 to 2016.  He was recently a Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften (Institute for Advanced Studies) of the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, and he was invited to give the Martin Buber Lecture in Intellectual History and Philosophy in Frankfurt in 2017.  His current research focuses on the philosophy of Benedict Spinoza.