Professor of Philosophy
About
Tad Schmaltz joined the Department in 2010, after having been a member of the philosophy faculty at Duke University for 21 years. He has published articles and book chapters on various topics concerning early modern philosophy and science, and is the author of Malebranche's Theory of the Soul (1996), Radical Cartesianism (2002), Descartes on Causation (2008), Early Modern Cartesianisms (2017), and The Metaphysics of the Material World: Suárez, Descartes, Spinoza (2020). He is the editor of Receptions of Descartes (2005) and Efficient Causation: A History (2014), and is a co-editor of Integrating History and Philosophy of Science (2012), The Problem of Universals in Early Modern Philosophy (2017), The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism (2019), Historical Dictionary of Descartes and Cartesian Philosophy (3rd edition, 2024), and The Cartesian Brain (2025). He is currently working on a book-length study of the metaphysical system of the prominent late scholastic Francisco Suárez (1548-1617). His research interests include the following features of early modern thought: the variety of early modern “Cartesianisms”; the influence of late scholasticism; the philosophical contributions of women; the nature and impact of the “Scientific Revolution”; substance-mode metaphysics and mereology; accounts of causation and freedom; and theories of mind, self-knowledge, and mind-body interaction and union.
Field(s) of Study
- Early Modern Philosophy
- Metaphysics
- History and Philosophy of Science
