September 8

Yitzhak Y. Melamed (JHU)

The Principle of Sufficient Reason in Early Modern Philosophy

Abstract: In this paper, I study the characteristics (modal and other) of the variants of the PSR advocated by Spinoza, Leibniz, and Du Chatelet.

Yitzhak Y. Melamed is Charlotte Bloomberg Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He holds an MA in philosophy and the history of science and logic from Tel Aviv University, and a PhD in philosophy from Yale University (2005). He has been awarded the Fulbright, Mellon, and American Academy for Jewish Research Fellowships. He has also won the ACLS Burkhardt (2011), NEH (2010), and Humboldt (2011) fellowships for his forthcoming book on Spinoza and German Idealism. He works at the intersection of philosophy (primarily metaphysics), Jewish and religious studies, the history of science, and the humanities in general.

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