Daniel W. Smith (philosopher)

Since 2019, Smith has been the Director of the interdisciplinary program in Philosophy and Literature at Purdue.

Smith’s research is focused on 19th and 20th century European philosophy. He also works and teaches in aesthetics, phenomenology, Nietzsche, Kant, Spinoza, Bergson, social and political philosophy, and the philosophy of technology.

From 2014-2017, Smith was part of an international collaborative project between Purdue and Paris Nanterre University on Analytic and French Philosophy in the 20th Century that sponsored academic exchanges between French and American students and faculty.

Smith’s book Essays on Deleuze was published in 2012 and was called a "a milestone in Deleuze studies." Keith Ansell-Pearson called it a "delightfully rich volume of essays: the essays are uniformly excellent," adding that "no one, at least in the English-speaking world, has done more to illuminate Deleuze's philosophical inventiveness than Daniel Smith," although he suggested that Smith did not "adequately explore" the connection of "Nietzsche's Nachlass remark on overturning Platonism" with "Deleuze's emphasis on the problem of simulacra." Kenneth Noe from Southern Illinois University stated that, "Daniel W. Smith’s work on the great French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) is owed a debt by English-speaking readers of Deleuze that is difficult to overstate." He noted that the book "records Smith’s significant contribution to Deleuze studies while also laying foundations for new avenues of research."

Smith received his Ph.D. from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago in 1997, after receiving an M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago in 1983 and a B.A. in Literature from Wheaton College in Illinois. He did language study at the Paris-Sorbonne University and Beijing Language and Culture University.

After receiving his doctorate from Chicago in 1997, Smith was assistant professor at Grinnell College from 1997 to 1998 and a Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of New South Wales in Australia from 1999 to 2001. He joined the faculty at Purdue University in 2001, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2005 and became Professor of Philosophy in 2014.

Smith is the founder and co-director, with Charles J. Stivale, of an online digital humanities project, The Deleuze Seminars, whose aim is to translate into English the seminar lectures that Deleuze gave at the University of Paris 8 at Vincennes/St. Denis between 1971 and 1987, and to make them available at the project’s website.

Daniel W. Smith (born October 26, 1958) is an American philosopher, academic, researcher, and translator. He is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University, where his work is focused on 19th and 20th century continental philosophy.