Daniel W. Smith (born October 26, 1958) is an American philosopher, academic, researcher, and translator.

[1] 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.

In aesthetics, he has written on the "logic of sensation" that Deleuze developed in his writings on painting, cinema, and literature.

[8] Smith has also published studies of lesser-known French thinkers who influenced Deleuze, such as Raymond Ruyer, André Leroi-Gourhan, and Pierre Klossowski, as well as a number of recent thinkers such as William E. Connolly, Catherine Malabou, Paul R. Patton, and Slavoj Žižek.

"[9] 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.

He noted that the book "records Smith’s significant contribution to Deleuze studies while also laying foundations for new avenues of research.