Paul Franks is Robert F. and Patricia Ross Weis Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies, and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Yale University. He works at the intersection of Jewish philosophy, Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy, and contemporary analytic philosophy. Recent work has focused on Lurianic kabbalah and its development within early modern and post-Kantian philosophy. His current interests include purposiveness in nature and mind, the development of ethical personality, and the relationship between writer, authorial persona, and reader in kabbalah and philosophy.
Before coming to Yale in 2011, he was the first occupant of the Jerahmiel S. and Carole S. Grafstein Chair in Jewish Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He was educated at Gateshead Talmudical College, at Oxford, and at Harvard, where he earned his PhD in 1993. He has also taught at Michigan, Indiana, and Notre Dame, and has been visiting professor at Chicago, Leuven, and Hebrew University.
In addition to numerous articles on German Idealism and Jewish philosophy, Paul is the translator and annotator (with Michael L. Morgan) of Franz Rosenzweig: Philosophical and Theological Writings (Hackett, 2000), and he is the author of All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Harvard, 2005). He is currently writing a book on the central concepts of post-Kantian Idealism in light of their kabbalistic roots and, with Michael L. Morgan, a history of Jewish philosophy from the 1490s to the 1990s.