Yitzhak Melamed

Yitzhak Yohanan Melamed^[1][2] (born March 7, 1968)^[3] is an Israeli philosopher and a leading scholar of Spinoza and modern philosophy. He is the Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University.^[4] He holds a master's degree in history & philosophy of science from Tel Aviv University and a philosophy PhD from Yale University. Melamed has won numerous fellowships and grants, including the Fulbright (1996-8), American Academy for Jewish Research (2003-5), Mellon (2005), Humboldt (2011), NEH (2012), and ACLS-Burkhardt (2012) Fellowships, and taught intensive masterclasses at the University of Toronto (2016), École normale supérieure de Lyon (2016), Peking University (2017), and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (2019).

Melamed is a graduate of Tel Aviv University and attended Yale University from 1990 and 1996. In 2005, he earned his doctorate at Yale with the topic The Metaphysics of Substance and the Metaphysics of Thought in Spinoza. He was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago between 2005 and 2008 before becoming an associate professor at Johns Hopkins in 2010, receiving full professorship in 2013.^[5]

In 2019 he analyzed two manuscripts of the Korte Verhandeling that were discovered in the mid-nineteenth century. The first manuscript was an appendix compiled with the geometrical method of the Spinoza's Ethics, but without providing any definition. The second appendix was presented as the earliest known version of the major work of the Netherlandish philosopher.^[6]

From Spinoza's letters he also ascertained that the earliest editions of the Ethics would have been published under the title of ‘Philosophy’.^[7]

On July 11, 2018, while a visiting scholar for the University of Bonn, Melamed was in Hofgarten Park [de] to hold a public lecture when he was attacked by a 20-year old man, who shouted antisemitic abuse at him and a female professor in English and German before repeatedly hitting Melamed in the head, knocking off his kippah. Shortly after, Melamed was pushed to the ground, beaten, and handcuffed by police who had been alerted by the colleague. Police officials stated that the officers had mistakenly assumed that Melamed was the aggressor because they saw him chase after the other man upon arrival.^[8][9][10] The Chief of Bonn Police Ursula Brohl-Sowa [de] and Interior Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia Herbert Reul issued apologies the next day. All four officers involved in the incident were investigated for obstruction of justice for attempting to pursuade Melamed into keeping quiet about the injuries he sustained during the arrest, an allegation the officers consistently denied and instead stating that Melamed had resisted heavily.^[11][12] They were subsequently transferred to other posts, but no charges were brought against any of them because the investigation concluded that no illegal conduct had occurred.^[13] The attacker, a German citizen of Palestinian descent with a prior conviction for armed robbery, was caught on July 17, after he was reported for threatening passerby with a knife in Hofgarten and sentenced to four years imprisonment on October 14, 2019 on one charge of Volksverhetzung.^[14] Melamed criticised the conduct of police and has compared the German police's behaviour to that of the Nazi era Schutzpolizei, who he noted killed his uncle, an aunt, and two of his grandparents, while also calling for normalization between Israelis and Palestinians.^[9][15][16]

• Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). xxii+232 pp. Paperback: 2014.
• Solomon Maimon’s Autobiography, translated by Paul Reitter. Edited and introduced by Yitzhak Y. Melamed and Abraham P. Socher (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
• Blackwell Companion to Spinoza, ed. Yitzhak Y. Melamed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2021).
• Spinoza’s Political Treatise: A Critical Guide, eds. Yitzhak Y. Melamed and Hasana Sharp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
• Spinoza’s Ethics: A Critical Guide, ed. Yitzhak Y. Melamed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
• Eternity: A History, ed. Yitzhak Y. Melamed (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
• The Young Spinoza: A Metaphysician in the Making, ed. Yitzhak Y. Melamed (Oxford: Oxford University, 2015).
• Spinoza and German Idealism, eds. Eckart Förster and Yitzhak Y. Melamed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
• Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise: A Critical Guide, eds. Yitzhak Y. Melamed and Michael Rosenthal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

• “Spinoza’s causa sui” in The Blackwell Companion to Spinoza, ed. Yitzhak Y. Melamed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2021), 116–125. "[1]"
• “The Earliest Draft of Spinoza’s Ethics” in Charles Ramond and Jack Stetter (eds.), Spinoza in 21st-Century French and American Philosophy. Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Moral and Political Philosophy. Bloomsbury, 2019, 93–112.
• “The Building Blocks of Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance, Attributes, and Modes” in Michael Della Rocca (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 84–113.
• “Spinoza’s Metaphysics of Thought: Parallelisms and the Multifaceted Structure of Ideas,” Philosophy & Phenomenological Research 86 (2013), 636–683.
• “Charitable Interpretations and the Political Domestication of Spinoza, or, Benedict in the Land of the Secular Imagination” in Eric Schlisser, Mogens Laerke and Justin Smith (eds.), The Methodology of the History of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 258–279.
• “Spinoza’s Deification of Existence”, Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 6 (2012), 75–104.
• “ ‘Omnis determinatio est negatio’ – Determination, Negation and Self-Negation in Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel” in Eckart Förster and Yitzhak Melamed (eds.), Spinoza and German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 175–96.
• “Acosmism or Weak Individuals? Hegel, Spinoza, and the Reality of the Finite”, Journal of the History of Philosophy 48 (2010), 77–92.
• “Spinoza’s Metaphysics of Substance: The Substance-Mode Relation as a Relation of Inherence and Predication”, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research (78:1) January 2009, 17–82.
• “Salomon Maimon and the Rise of Spinozism in German Idealism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 42 (January 2004), 67–96.

• A talk on the first draft of Spinoza's Ethics. Paris 2017.
• Yitzhak Melamed's home page
• Academia.edu page
• 2017 Interview at 3AM Magazine.