Anat Schechtman

Position title: Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy

Professor Schechtman’s primary research interests are in seventeenth century philosophy. She has written on several figures in this period, including Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, and Malebranche. Her two main lines of research concern infinity and the metaphysics of substance and essence, as they are understood in this period. She has published articles in Philosophical Review, Mind, Philosophers’ Imprint, and Journal of the History of Philosophy, and has taught at Chicago and Harvard. She is currently at work on a monograph, Ontic Infinity, on quantitative and non-quantitative notions of infinity in the seventeenth century.

Website: https://sites.google.com/site/schechtmananat/

Languages: Hebrew, German, French, Latin

Research Interests: Modern Philosophy, especially Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mathematics, and Philosophy of Religion

Education:

2004-2011 Yale University, Philosophy, Ph.D.
2003-04 Boston University, doctoral program in Philosophy
2000-03 Tel Aviv University, Philosophy and Mathematics, B.Sc. (High Honors) Special Program for Outstanding Students

Departments: Department of Philosophy

Teaching:

Introduction to Philosophy (Wisconsin, 2020)
History of Modern Philosophy (Wisconsin, 2015, 2017, 2020)
Special Topics in Ethics (Wisconsin, 2020)
The Meaning of Life (Wisconsin, 2018×2, 2019, 2020)

Selected Publications:

“Modality and Essence in Early Modern Philosophy”, in Modality: A Conceptual History (eds. Yitzhak
Melamed and Samuel Newlands), Oxford University Press (forthcoming)
“Three Infinities in Early Modern Philosophy”, Mind 128 (512): 1117-1147 (2019)
Reprinted in The Philosopher’s Annual as “one of the ten best articles published in philosophy” in 2019
“The Allegedly Cartesian Roots of Spinoza’s Metaphysics”, Philosophers’ Imprint 18 (21): 1-23 (2018)
“The Ontic and the Iterative: Descartes on the Infinite and the Indefinite”, in Infinity in Early Modern
Philosophy (eds. Ohad Nachtomy and Reed Winegar), Springer, 27-44 (2018)
“Substance and Independence in Descartes”, Philosophical Review 125, 2: 155-204 (2016)
Reprinted in The Philosopher’s Annual as “one of the ten best articles published in philosophy” in 2016
“Descartes’s Argument for the Existence of the Idea of an Infinite Being”, Journal of the History of
Philosophy 52, 3: 487-517 (2014)
Reprinted in The Philosopher’s Annual as “one of the ten best articles published in philosophy” in 2014