Rate My Professor Michael LeBuffe

Michael LeBuffe holds the Baier Chair in Early Modern Philosophy and serves as Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Otago, where he also acts as Undergraduate Coordinator, Course Adviser, and convener of the Philosophy Club. He received his BA from Princeton University in 1991 and PhD from the University of California, San Diego in 2000, studying under Nick Jolley, David Brink, and Richard Arneson. Before arriving at Otago in 2014, LeBuffe was on the faculty at Texas A&M University.

His scholarship centers on the history of philosophy, with a primary focus on Spinoza's interpretation, extending to ethics, philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and the broader early modern period and history of ethics. LeBuffe has published three monographs with Oxford University Press: Spinoza’s Ethics: A Guide (2023), Spinoza on Reason (2017), and From Bondage to Freedom: Spinoza on Human Excellence (2010). Among his many peer-reviewed articles are “Citizens and States in Spinoza’s Political Treatise” in Mind (2021), “Laws and Nature in Spinoza’s Ethics” in the Journal of the History of Philosophy (2026), “Theories about Consciousness in Spinoza’s Ethics” in the Philosophical Review (2010), and “Virtue as Power” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy (2011). He has contributed chapters to prominent volumes such as A Companion to Spinoza (Blackwell, 2021), Hobbes’s On the Citizen: A Critical Guide (Cambridge, 2020), and The Cambridge Critical Guide to Spinoza’s Ethics (Cambridge, 2017). LeBuffe has supervised doctoral and masters theses on Spinoza, Descartes’s Meditations, Hobbes’s moral theory, Hume’s Treatise, Leibniz’s metaphysics, and virtue ethics, among others. Additionally, he authors entries for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, including on Holbach and Spinoza’s Psychological Theory, and edits the Spinoza: Ethical Theory category on PhilPapers.