Don Rutherford

Don Rutherford served as a professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego from 1999 until his retirement in 2021 . Before coming to UC San Diego, Professor Rutherford taught at Emory University and at Reed College. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley. His primary area of research is the history of modern philosophy. Professor Rutherford is the author of Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature (1995), editor and translator (with Brandon Look) of The Leibniz-Des Bosses Correspondence (2007), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy (2006). With Daniel Garber, Professor Rutherford edits Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy. A significant part of his recent work has been in the history of ethics and its intersection with metaphysics and religion, focusing on such figures as Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza and Leibniz, and parallels between ancient and early modern ethical thought.