Name Paul Franks | Role Writer | |
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Occupation Scholar, Writer, Academic Books All Or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism Education Harvard University, Balliol College | ||
Paul Walter Franks, is a scholar, writer and professor of philosophy. He graduated with his PhD from Harvard University in 1993. Franks' dissertation, entitled "Kant and Hegel on the Esotericism of Philosophy", was supervised by Stanley Cavell and won the Emily and Charles Carrier Prize for a Dissertation in Moral Philosophy at Harvard University. He completed his B.A (First Class) and M.A, in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford. Prior to this, Franks received his general education at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, and studied classical rabbinic texts at Gateshead Talmudical College.
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His primary areas of research and specialization are Jewish philosophy, Immanuel Kant, German idealism, metaphysics, epistemology, the foundations of human sciences, and post-Kantian approaches within Analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy. He has taught at Indiana University (Bloomington) between 1996 and 2000, University of Notre Dame from 2000 to 2004, the University of Chicago in 2003, and the University of Toronto from 2004 to 2011. Franks has been Faculty Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto; Brackenbury Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford; Lady Davis Graduate Research Fellow at the Hebrew University; Mrs. Giles F. Whiting Dissertation Fellow in the Humanities at Harvard University; Junior Fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows; and Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies.
Franks was appointed as the inaugural holder of the Senator Jerahmiel S. and Carole S. Grafstein Chair in Jewish Philosophy at the University of Toronto in 2008. He was appointed in 2011 to a senior position at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut. He teaches in the Department of Philosophy, the Program in Judaic Studies, the Department of Religious Studies, and the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures.
In December 2012, Franks gave a lecture entitled "From Indeterminacy to Idealism" at the opening of the Forschungskolleg Analytic German Idealism at the University of Leipzig. In 2014, he gave a keynote lecture, “What becomes of Jewish Law in the wake of Emancipation?” at the British Association of Jewish Studies annual meeting in Dublin, Ireland. In 2015, he gave the keynote address, "Schelling and Maimon on the World-Soul", at the annual meeting of the North American Schelling Society in Newfoundland, Canada.
Family
Franks currently lives in Riverdale, New York, with his wife, Hindy Najman, who is Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oxford University, and their children Ezra and Marianna.