One of the most powerful traditions of the Jewish fascination with language is that of the Name. Indeed, the Jewish mystical tradition would seem a two millennia long meditation on the nature of name in relation to object, and how name mediates between subject and object. Even within the tide of the 20th century's linguistic turn, the aspect most notable in - the almost entirely secular - Jewish philosophers is that of the personal name, here given (...) pivotal importance in the articulation of human relationships and dialogue. The Name of God in Jewish Thought examines the texts of Judaism pertaining to the Name of God, offering a philosophical analysis of these as a means of understanding the metaphysical role of the name generally, in terms of its relationship with identity. The book begins with the formation of rabbinic Judaism in Late Antiquity, travelling through the development of the motif into the Medieval Kabbalah, where the Name reaches its grandest and most systematic statement - and the one which has most helped to form the ideas of Jewish philosophers in the 20th and 21st Century. This investigation will highlight certain metaphysical ideas which have developed within Judaism from the Biblical sources, and which present a direct challenge to the paradigms of western philosophy. Thus a grander subtext is a criticism of the Greek metaphysics of being which the west has inherited, and which Jewish philosophers often subject to challenges of varying subtlety; it is these philosophers who often place a peculiar emphasis on the personal name, and this emphasis depends on the historical influence of the Jewish metaphysical tradition of the Name of God. Providing a comprehensive description of historical aspects of Jewish Name-Theology, this book also offers new ways of thinking about subjectivity and ontology through its original approach to the nature of the name, combining philosophy with text-critical analysis. As such, it is an essential resource for students and scholars of Jewish Studies, Philosophy and Religion. (shrink)

What should philosophical theology look like after the critique of Onto-theology, after Phenomenology, and in the age of Speculative Realism? What does Kabbalah have to say to Philosophy? Since Kant and especially since Husserl, philosophy has only permitted itself to speak about how one relates to God in terms of the intentionality of consciousness and not of how God is in himself. This meant that one could only ever speak to God as an addressed and yearned-for holy Thou, but not (...) to God as infinite creator of all. In this book-length essay, the author argues that reality itself is made up of the Holy Name of God. Drawing upon the set-theoretical ontology of Alain Badiou, the computational theory of Stephen Wolfram, the physics of Frank Tipler, the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan, and the genius of Georg Cantor, the author works to demonstrate that the universe is a computer processing the divine Name and that all existence is made of information (the bit). As a result of this ontic pan-computationalism, it is shown that the future resurrection of the dead can take place and how it may in fact occur. Along the way, the book also offers compelling critiques of several significant theories of reality, including the phenomenological theologies of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion, Process Theology, and Object-Oriented Ontology. Reality in the Name of God explores how the concepts of Jewish mysticism can be articulated and deployed as philosophical theses within current metaphysical debates. It provides a new and dynamic Structural Realist ontology of information. Ultimately, the book aims to deal a death blow to the restriction of philosophy and theology in relation to elaborations of a how a believer relates to a God outside the mind and to return thought to a direct encounter with the divine nature of reality itself and its creator"--Website of the publisher, October 19, 2020. (shrink)

“Thy word (or: essence) is true from the beginning”; thus reads the Psalmist's passage, oft quoted in kabbalistic literature (Psalm 119: 160). According to the originally conceived Judaistic meaning, truth was the word of God which was audible both acoustically and linguistically. Under the system of the synagogue, revelation is an acoustic process, not a visual one; or revelation at least ensues from an area which is metaphysically associated with the acoustic and the perceptible (in a sensual context). This is (...) repeatedly emphasised with reference to the words of the Torah (Deuteronomy 4: 12): “Ye heard the voice of the words, but saw no similitude; only ye heard a voice.” What precisely we are to understand by this voice and what is uttered through it is the very question which the various currents of Judaistic religious thought have constantly posed themselves. The indissoluble link between the idea of the revealed truth and the notion of language—is as much, that is, as the word of God makes itself heard through the medium of human language, if, otherwise, human experience can reach the knowledge of such a word at all—is presumably one of the most important, if not the most important, legacies bequeathed by Judaism to the history of religions. (shrink)

Religion is one of the most powerful forces running through human history, and although often presented as a force for good, its impact is frequently violent and divisive. This provocative work brings together cutting-edge research from both evolutionary and cognitive psychology to help readers understand the psychological structure of religious morality and the origins of religious violence. Introduces a fundamentally new approach to the analysis of religion in a style accessible to the general reader Applies insights from evolutionary and cognitive (...) psychology to both Judaism and Christianity, and their texts, to help understand the origins of religious violence Argues that religious violence is grounded in the moral psychology of religion Illustrates its controversial argument with reference to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the response to the attacks from both the terrorists and the President. Suggests strategies for beginning to counter the divisive aspects of religion Discusses the role of religion and religious criticism in the contemporary world. Argues for a position sceptical of the moral authority of religion, while also critiquing the excesses of the “new atheists” for failing to appreciate the moral contributions of religion Awarded Honourable Mention, 2010 Prose Awards. (shrink)

This article first describes some of the chief contrasts between Judaism and American secularism in their underlying convictions about the business environment and the expectations which all involved in business can have of each other—namely, duties vs. rights,communitarianism vs. individualism, and ties to God and to the environment based on our inherent status as God’s creatures rather than on our pragmatic choice. Conservative Judaism’s methodology for plumbing the Jewish tradition for guidance is described and contrasted to those of (...) Orthodox and Reform Judaism.One example of how Conservative Judaism can inform us on a current matter is developed at some length—namely, privacy in the workplace. That section discusses (1) the reasons for protecting privacy; (2) protection from intrusion, including employer spying; (3) protection from disclosure of that intended to remain private; (4) individualistic vs. communitarian approaches to grounding the concern for privacy; and (5) contemporary implications for insuring privacy in business. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 25, Issue 2, pp 232 - 255 In Book III of _The Star of Redemption_, Franz Rosenzweig contrasts Judaism and Christianity: Judaism consists in the eternal passage of a people from creation to revelation; it suspends the divide between God’s presence and his worldly manifestation. For Rosenzweig, being Jewish means to be with God in the world. Christianity, however, defers salvation. While Judaism is with God in the world, Christianity retreats from God and the (...) world. Christianity therefore has no “immediacy.” How can both Judaism and Christianity then live in immediacy with God in the world? Seeking to overcome Rosenzweig’s dichotomy, I endeavor to think an immediate relationship with God in the world by turning to one of Rosenzweig’s “biggest names”: Hermann Cohen. Following Cohen, I take it that Judeo-Christian continuity begins before both religions. I wish to explore the passage from the origin to the prophetic that constitutes the idea of a “pure monotheism” in Cohen’s philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Judaism and EnlightenmentHeidi Morrison RavvenAdam Sutcliffe. Judaism and Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xv + 314. Cloth, $60.00.Adam Sutcliffe's detailed and wide-ranging historical study of the image of the Jews and of Judaism in the minds of Enlightenment thinkers very broadly conceived might better be [End Page 343] titled Enlightenment Myths of Jews and Judaism. Sutcliffe admirably captures the consistently mythic (...) portrayal of Jews and Judaism mostly offered as interpretations of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) rather than with reference to actual living or historical Jews. Although not explicitly acknowledged, what Sutcliffe offers the reader is a comprehensive catalogue of Enlightenment ideology or, better, theologizing about Judaism and the Jews. I say theologizing because the ubiquitous stark ambivalence toward the Jews that Sutcliffe argues Enlightenment thinkers to a person harbored, from the early Christian Hebraists and Kabbalists to the deists, to Voltaire and beyond the Enlightenment proper even to Freud (whom Sutcliffe not completely in jest regards as the last philosophe) echoes and reconfigures the quintessential Christian ambivalence toward Jews as both God's chosen and God's rejected. Christianity's need to legitimate the Hebrew Bible as the Old Testament stands in perpetual conflict with its need to de-legitimate the Jews as its rightful owners and heirs. Sutcliffe is utterly convincing that the Enlightenment conception of the Jews has irreducible mythic and conflictual aspects.The author's intended purpose, however, which is to convince the reader that Judaism and the Jews are the paradigmatic crux of the unassimilability of the mythic and particular by Enlightenment reason and hence to bring into question Enlightenment ideals themselves, is less convincing. Instead the data Sutcliffe amasses seem to point to the conclusion that Enlightenment thinkers were deeply imbued with mythic categories and ancient prejudices not easily sloughed off by mere protestations of rational autonomy and commitment to universal ideals.Sutcliffe's mistake is to grant to the Enlightenment thinkers their ground on both their self-valuation as exemplars of the deployment of universal reason or rational universalism and also their classification of Judaism as particularist mythos in opposition to just such reason. What Sutcliffe's carefully collected and exhaustively presented data suggest, instead, is that when it came to Judaism, the Enlightenment thinkers were neither rational nor universalist but instead culture bound and impassioned. The book's great strength is its admirable and exhaustive scholarly grasp of European Enlightenment works and its systematic presentation of the Jews in the imagination of these Enlighteners. Nevertheless, missing from this book is a scholarly understanding of Jewish sources both biblical and post-biblical and especially of Jewish philosophy. As a result, Judaism (and even the Hebrew Bible) signify to the author what Enlighteners mistakenly and prejudicially cast it as, namely, Europe's quintessential mythic particularism. But this caricature ignores the reality of rabbinic Judaism's profoundly rationalist tendencies and also the universalist aspirations and claims of the Jewish philosophic tradition whose deep roots go back to the Hellenistic era, let alone the universality of the Bible which is hardly less than that of Shakespeare. Hence Sutcliffe perpetuates a negative (and false) stereotype in the name of valorizing it. In this he is persuaded by a post-modernist agenda suggested, but not generally intrusive, throughout the book and made explicit at the end.Particularly jarring is Sutcliffe's inclusion of Spinoza in his catalogue of Enlightenment villifiers of Judaism as a form of unassimilable particularism and mythic primitivism. Spinoza instead clearly and repeatedly argues in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus that biblical Judaism is exemplified par excellence by its universalist ethics and hence it is the Ancient Jewish Commonwealth that ought to serve as an exemplar for the Dutch republic and all modern polities, as Michael Rosenthal has admirably shown in several essays. Spinoza draws this conclusion from the deployment of what he explicitly develops as his scientific method of reading texts, a method he argues is the same as the scientific method of amassing the data of nature and systematizing it in order to let its explanatory categories emerge therefrom (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, vii). The central result of using the scientific method on the Bible... (shrink)

The Hebrew phrase tikkun olam means repairing, mending or healing the world. Today, the phrase tikkun olam, particularly in liberal Jewish American circles, has become a slogan for a diverse range of topics such as activism, political participation, call and pursuit of social justice, charities, environmental issues and healthy nutrition. Moreover, the presidents of the United States who attend Jewish religious days and Jewish ceremonies state the tikkun olam in its Hebrew origin, pointing out its origin embedded in the (...) class='Hi'>Judaism and a religious rule and/or an obligation that is important in Jewish tradition and thought. Nevertheless, when we look at the context of religious literature in which the phrase is used, it is seen that, although it is difficult to make a clear definition, it does not reflect modern/widespread uses and their meanings. Furthermore, tikkun olam is an ignored and even rejected concept by the Rabbinic Judaism which claims to represent the tradition and its current representative Orthodox Judaism. This fact is also seen in the usage and prevalence of the term in the U.S. and Israel. Thus, in this article, especially with reference to the norms of Mishnah, the religious-juristicial contexts and possible meanings of the phrase of tikkun olam, the notion of tikkun olam in Jewish liturgy and its implied meaning and the Kabbalistic understanding of tikkun will be presented, the development, changing and conversion of the phrase in modern age and its contemporary usage areas and reinterpretations will be demonstrated.Summary: Recently and especially in the U.S., the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam are used as a slogan in a widespread manner such as for activism, political participation, social justice, all kinds of charities, environmental issues, counter terrorism and healthy nutrition. Such a common usage of the phrase is largely the result of its literal meaning and ambiguity. Hence, this article aims to explore the place of the concept of tikkun olam in Jewish religious literature and its variations and semantic changes. Tikkun olam, literally means the repairing, mending or healing the world. However, regarding its religious context, it is difficult to determine what it means accurately. In time, some has used the tikkun olam as a legislative justification for changing specific laws, some has attributed to it an eschatological meaning which indicates to the mesianic age, and some has dicussed it in the context of mystical sense. The first usage of the phrase of tikkun olam in the Jewish religious literature was simply in the form of “because of tikkun olam” in Gittin epistle, a tractate of Mishnah and Talmud. Here, the phrase was used as a reason of a judgment concerning to the subjects of marriage, divorcement, slavery, captivity etc. In the context of these subjects tikkun olam indicates to the similar meanings like “repairing, organizing, healing, changing the world; regulating and improving the society, maintaining the social order, and prioritizing the common good. In fact, the concept of tikkun olam as the reason of the judgements in these matters is likely related to a juridical reason that intends to ensure the personal and public welfare such as clarifying the marital status of woman, to prevent the capture and seizure from Jewish society, and to deal with economy and identification of juridical status of the slaves.The other reference to tikkun olam appears in the second part of the aleinu prayer. However, the notion of tikkun olam in the aleinu prayer refers to a situation that happens in God’s Kingdom if Torah and halakhah are followed carefully. Hence, the aleinu prayer’s tikkun olam points out eschatological expectation which desires a messianic age, but not the socio-political and ecological concerns of the world as in the current fields and meanings.The modern idea of tikkun olam is also associated with the Jewish mystical movement, Kabbalah. Nonetheless, the concept of tikkun in Kabbalah is not a concept related to the socio-political circumstances of the world where we live in, but it is related to the restoring of the divine world. In order to restoring the divine world, human should fulfill the commands by studying Torah and have a spiritual and moral rehabilitation process by engaging in ascetic practices.The use of the phrase of tikkun olam gradually progress in the socio-political life of the U.S. The first use of the expression of tikkun olam in the U.S. was in the 1950’s by Shlomo Bardin, the founder of the Brandeis Camp Institute in California. Bardin asserted that the Aleinu prayer was the most important expression of Jewish values, particularly the expression “le-taken olam be-malchut shaddai” that is typically translated as “when the world shall be perfected under the reign of the God.” Bardin suggested that these words referred to the obligation of Jews to work for a more perfect world. The concept of tikkun olam entered contemporary usage by the way of its being preferred as a name to those such as social justice and charity programmes which was launched by the Reformist and Conservative groups in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1970s, United Synagogue Youth which is the national youth foundation of the conservative movement adopted the expression of tikkun olam and changed the title of its social action programs from “Building Spiritual Bridges” to “Tikkun Olam.” Nowadays, United Synagogue Youth proceeds all of its social activities and tzedakah programs through the tikkun olam project.By the end of 1970’s, New Jewish Agenda, an organization devoted itself to the religious and social values, acknowledged the slogan of “Tikkun Olam” as the spirit of its ideology. In 1986, Michael Lerner entitled a left-oriented liberal publication with the concept of Tikkun by claiming that this concept represented the origin of Judaism, and he take an important role on making the concept have a prevalence.Pittsburgh Platform organized in 1999 by the Reformist Jewish Movement emphasized that people must perform the most significant moral principles in the relationships with all non-Jewish people and all other creatures. This platform also stated that making the world a better place with the help of God would quicken the upcoming the messianic age. The tikkun understanding of the Reformist movement evolved to more universal realm by embracing the non-Jewish people, as well. Over the last two decades, successive presidents of the U.S. who attended in the ceremonies of Jewish religious days and Jewish assemblages have contributed to the prevalence and usefulness of tikkun olam by mentioning the phrase of tikkun olam in Hebrew, expressing that this is an essential principle of Judaism and addressing that this has a central role in Jewish tradition and thought. On the other hand, this concept does not have an important or a central place in Rabbinic Judaism and even in Orthodox Jewish communities which are the current representatives of Rabbinic Judaism. Moreover, Reformist, Conservative, and Reconstructionist American Jews who are considered on the liberal side of the politics has put the concept on the current use and the world’s agenda. Thus, the phrase of the tikkun olam is more popular in non-Judaic milieux in the U.S. than the Jews in Israel. In Israel where the Orthodox doctrine is dominated and shaped the people, tikkun olam is regarded as a western value and is ignored. (shrink)

This article reads Levinas’s “And God Created Woman” in light of its socio-political context, Mai soixante-huit. It explores themes from his “Judaism and Revolution,” in which he reframed concepts of revolution, exegesis, the revolutionary, and human alienation. Following these themes, which run subtly through his Talmudic remarks on women and indirectly on feminism, I examine his arguments about a “signification beyond universality” and the fraught relationship between formal equity in gender relations and the practice of justice, as embodied by (...) the Antigone-like Rizpah bath Aiah and analyzed in Levinas’s Talmudic reading “Toward the Other.” I summarize the Rabbinic debate about the meaning of an extra yod in the term often translated as “to create” in Genesis, turning to the significance of dissymmetry between the Hebrew names of “man” and “woman,” Ish and Isha. In light of this, Biblicist and psychoanalyst Daniel Sibony opens further insights into gender, naming, and identity. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Setting the Task Constructing Yahweh The Ten Commandments: An Evolutionary Interpretation Conclusion: The Evolved Law.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 24.1 (2004) 278-283 [Access article in PDF] The Voice of God on Mount Sinai. Rabbinic Commentaries on Exodus 20:1 In Light of Sufi and Zen-Buddhist Texts. By Reinhard Neudecker. Rome: Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 2002. 157 pp. Reinhard Neudecker's study of the central event of the first five books of the Bible, namely the revelation of God on Mount Sinai to Moses and the Israelites, is an important (...) contribution to interfaith studies that should be of interest to both the scholar and layperson alike. The clarity of purpose and treatment makes this study very accessible; each chapter is thoughtfully structured, with rich footnotes that provide documentation, further explanation, and information. The appendixes contain the relevant rabbinic texts in the original Hebrew; indices of terms, subjects, and Bible citations; as well as a helpful list of consulted works.The stated purpose of the study is to shed light on enigmatic rabbinical interpretations of Exodus 20:1, the verse that introduces the TenWords (commandments) [End Page 278] that form the basis of the complete Torah by taking into consideration analogous passages from the Sufi and Zen Buddhist traditions. In explaining his methodology, the author makes three important distinctions. First, Neudecker is "not dealing with Judaism, Islam and Zen Buddhism as such, but with the views and experiences of some rabbinic Jews, some Sufi Muslims and some Zen Buddhists" (p. x). Second, the chosen texts are offered for their spiritual and mystical insight, not for their historical context or content, because "the mystic has learned to convert the great events recorded by tradition into symbols which express the ongoing inner revelation to which he has been exposed" (p. 6). Because spiritual and mystical writers generally refrain from explaining deep experiences openly (especially because of the impossibility of putting them into words), the author refrains from adding his own interpretations and instead invites the reader to a meditative encounter with the texts. Third, the author does not intend to offer simple parallels or to readily claim correspondences between the rabbinic, Sufi, and Zen texts, but leaves it up to the reader to judge what the "different traditions may have in common and to what degree and where one tradition may go a step further than the others (p. 11, n. 30). His main purpose, as stated above, is to understand the rabbinic comments better by using the method of "intercultural reading" in drawing upon Sufi and Zen Buddhist texts.After the introductory chapter, which offers the methodological considerations and basic information about the Rabbinic sources and Buddhist terminology, the author presents Exod. 20:1 in its rabbinic translation: "And God spoke all these words to say." This short verse has become the stumbling block for the rabbinic interpreter, just as much as a Zen koan becomes a stumbling block for the Zen student or an obscure verse in the Koran for the Sufi. What these stumbling blocks have in common is that they open up a new way of nondiscursive understanding of the text that leads to profound insights and a deep spiritual experience.Chapters 4-9 of the book are devoted to unraveling the mysteries of these insights. The reader is drawn into an engaging process that opens up layer upon layer of meaning, comparable to the peeling of an onion. A short exposition of the themes of each chapter as introduction to the texts proves very helpful for orientation in this process. Chapter 4 addresses the question of how the people at Sinai heard the Ten Words. The rabbis differ on whether the people heard all of the commandments or only the first two of them, but the important point of comparison is the enigmatic statement that God pronounced all the Ten Words, including the entire Torah, "in one single sound, as the (human) mouth cannot speak and the (human) ear cannot hear" (p. 35). This statement implies that God's revelation exceeds the limits of human speaking and hearing, and that God communicates in... (shrink)

: Hagar and Ishmael have been portrayed in Jewish sources in an increasingly negative way, even before the rise of Islam. The culmination of that negative portrayal constitutes the story of the expulsion of mother and son as rendered by Pirke de rabbi Eliezer. This story in its basic pre-Islamic form, functioning as a midrash interpretation of the Bible relating Hagar’s expulsion and the twofold visit of Abraham to Ishmael, was to serve as the point of departure for Islamic stories (...) about Hagar. The first Islamic source for the story of Hagar, ʿAbd al-Razzāq, had already transformed the Jewish story into a highly positive account of Hagar as trusting in God and worthy of miracles. Simultaneously, this Islamic version harmonized the story with Qurʾānic statements about Abraham building the House, connected it to an utterance of Muhammad and buttressed the ritual of the Saʿy, the running between the two hills in Mecca, thereby refuting pagan associations as secondary deviations. As for Ishmael, he becomes associated with the pure Arabic tribe of the Jurhum. The story of the two wives of Ishmael, which serves in the Jewish version as a an exegesis of Gen 21:21 by adducing a derogatory statement on the Moabites and ending in a reconciliation between Abraham and Ishmael, is transformed into a foundation story of the Arabic offspring of Ishmael who marries into the Jurhum tribe. Whereas the Islamic stories, transmitted by al-Ţabarī and Bukharī, can be traced back two generations earlier than the latter, namely to ʿAbd al-Razzāq, his isnad in turn proves to be reliable up to Ibn Jubayr. Ibn Jubayr’s debate about different versions of the story took place around 700 C.E., an attribution that can be trusted, hence corroborating Harald Motzki’s overall but careful thesis about the reliability of the isnad. The integration of the Hagar story into the Qurʾānic story of Abraham building ‘the House’ together with Ishmael dates, at the latest, from 700 C.E. (shrink)

The author of this little book makes no claim to being a philosopher, and is fully conscious of the very obvious limits of his writing ability. He is fully aware, too, of the nebulousness of his task, the task, namely, which he has taken upon himself of discussing what he calls universal religion on the basis of the Bible, the Talmud and the history of the Jewish people. Overcoming, however, his reluctance to divulge his ideas in writing because he feels (...) intuitively that he can transcend all his human frailty, he sets about presenting us with a philosophy of entire existence, as he himself puts it. A formidable task indeed. He would be grievously hurt, he tells us, were we to label his effort as theology. And still we are within our rights to ask: what else but theology could or should be the rational penetration of what God has spoken to men? In fact, the finished product turns out to be neither philosophy nor theology, but rather a series of pious, at times even pseudo-mystical reflections on God’s revelation as found in the Old Testament and as interpreted down the centuries in the various Jewish traditions. The serious philosopher or earnest theologian or the historian of religions will find nothing here. (shrink)

This essay takes on the implicit claim in Taylor's A Secular Age, forecast in some of his earlier writings, that the desire for a meaningful life can never be satisfied in this life. As a result, A Secular Age is suffused with a tragic view of existence; its love of narratives of religious longing makes no sense otherwise. Yet there are other models of religion that lend meaning to existence, and in the majority of this essay, I take up one (...) model that Taylor ignores in A Secular Age, namely that of a God who is immanent in social life throughout religious law. Turning to Maimonides's account of divine law in the Guide of the Perplexed, I argue that a vision of the divine law that is divine because of its effects in society, namely the promotion of human welfare, can mend the relations between varying kinds of believers and unbelievers in a way that Taylor thinks is impossible. A God who commands laws is a God who inaugurates an “anthropocentric shift” long before current understandings of secularization see it beginning. (shrink)

Woody Allen’s uneasy relationship with organized religions, as represented in his entire work, has often drawn accusations of atheism and ethnic self-hatred, just as his personal behavior, as represented in the media, has stirred a series of allegations of immorality. However, Woody Allen’s exploration of religion, faith, and morality is far more complex and epitomizes the experience of modern man, living in a disenchanted universe. While most scholars focused on discussing the provocative debates over faith and religion in Woody Allen’s (...) films, the main purpose of this paper is to investigate what underlies Woody Allen’s obsessive preoccupation with the existence of divinity, as expressed in that part of his work which received little critical attention, namely his short fiction. The purpose of such an analysis is not to clear Woody Allen’s vexed reputation, but to understand the relevance of his individual ideology for the religious and moral conundrums of modern man. The corpus selected for this analysis consists of a series of relevant short stories and essays published in the 1991 edition of The Complete Prose of Woody Allen , a volume which gathers the texts published in three other short story collections. (shrink)

Biblical scholars have given diverse explanations for the Lamb of God metaphor in John 1:29 and 1:36. Most scholars are of the opinion that ‘amnos’ refers to the Passover lamb. This explanation is not obvious from the context of the Fourth Gospel. To understand the metaphor ‘lamb’ or ‘amnos’ of God, one should understand the transferable meaning of the figure or image. In this comparison, only the vehicle, namely the lamb, is given. What and who the lamb is stays open. (...) It can be anything within the limits of the other story elements that have the same qualities as a lamb. To uncover the communicative dynamics of the metaphor, the exegete must have insight into the meaning and function of the original metaphor. Rhetoric provides a clue for the interpretation of the metaphor, namely that it is a Lamb of God. Within the pericope other rhetorical clues like antithesis and varietas are also provided. These clues are important but do not explain the image of the lamb. In this study, these problems will be considered via another medium, namely Hellenistic art and imagesand their penetration into Judaism and Christianity during the 1st century CE. Hellenistic and biblical images will be used to give an alternative interpretation of the metaphor of the Lamb of God. (shrink)

This exploration into spirituality and climate change employs the “four paths” of the creation spirituality tradition. The author recognizes those paths in the rich teachings of Pope Francis’s encyclical, Laudato Si' and applies them in considering the nobility of the scientist's vocation. Premodern thinkers often resisted any split between science and religion. The author then lays out the basic archetypes for recognizing the sacredness of creation, namely, the Cosmic Christ (Christianity); the Buddha Nature (Buddhism); the Image of God (Judaism); (...) the “Primordial Man” (Hinduism), as well as the premodern universal teaching of “God as Beauty.” He addresses the subject of evil which deserves serious attention in the face of the realities posed by climate change and the resistance to addressing them. In the concluding section, the author speaks of a new Order of the Sacred Earth that was launched in fall 2017 to gather persons of whatever spiritual tradition or none to devote themselves to preserving Mother Earth. (shrink)

Metaphysics is a field where the positions of Kant and Mendelssohn differed significantly, from the essays for the Academy of Sciences right up to their last works. While Kant is increasingly doubtful of the objective validity of metaphysics and comes to admit only its subjective significance as a reflection of insuppressible human need, Mendelssohn continues to defend its objective validity with respect to sciences and natural theology. After reducing the valid proofs for the existence of God to the ontological argument, (...) Kant refuses this argument by means of his conception of existence as a position. Meanwhile, Mendelssohn upholds the legitimacy of such an argument and sees it as a bulwark against scepticism and Kant's paradox of the thing-in-itself. Notwithstanding these differences, they are allies in the defence of reason against visionary exaltation, as becomes apparent in the debate on spinozism between Hamann, Jacobi and Wizenmann on the one hand; and Mendelssohn on the other. The profound and pertinent dialogue between the two philosophers lasted more than 20 years and touched upon many subjects; such as the different methods in mathematics and philosophy, the philosophical meaning of intensive magnitude, the evidence, certainty and probability in metaphysics, natural theology and morals, reason, feeling and moral sense, pure religion and historical faiths, the meaning of human history. They agreed on attributing a fundamental role to freedom and on evaluating religions accordingly. Kant acknowledged the importance of M's Jerusalem for human emancipation. However; he criticised Judaism as a religion for slaves in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and so misunderstood M's affection for his own faith. They were also at variance over the progress of the human race; while Kant subscribed to the optimistic point of view and linked the efforts for human betterment to confidence in the progressive improvement of the human race even in the moral sphere, Mendelssohn rejected this evolutionary scheme and insisted upon the originality and diversity of human beings in different civilisations and times. Their differences were far from being resolved and the interest in Mendelssohn's thought during the Idealist period and later gives clear evidence of that. (shrink)

A study of the methods, approaches, prayers, etc to realize the 'unity experience' with THE ONE REAL SELF (Vedanta, Hinduism, ) God (Judaism), Gottheit (Christianity), Buddha mind (Buddhism), The Beloved (Sufism, Islam) of a number of mystics from several religious traditions. I wrote about this in a number of books and articles, for example about methods, techniques, practices and methodology here: as well as exploring and illustrating the subject-matter of philosophizing here: Explorations, questions and searches not put down on (...) paper are probably more important than the ones mentioned above. These were occurrences for almost as long as I can remember. They took many forms, endless questions about everything under the sun, unsatisfied with unexplained socio-cultural institutions, communities, social relationships, social roles, behaviour, values, norms and much more – I had to question them rather than merely submit to them or act in accordance with them. Although I expressed these questions and queries about the status quo in many areas such as sport, art, social sciences, endless reading and marginal groups and relationships I realized that they form part of the philosophical discourse. Not the discourse that has become the expression of the professionalization of philosophy the last few hundred years, but of the not-institutionalized practice of original thinking, of creative philosophical thinking. As examples of the latter, Socrates, of course, the pre-Socratics, Plato, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Plotinus, writers on Mysticism such as Meister Eckhart, van Ruysbroeck, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, from Advaita, Zen and other Buddhist schools, Wittgenstein, Hume, German Idealists, Rumi, novelists and poets, Paul Klee and other visual artists and many names who form part of the seeking for the unity-experience as explored in History of Mysticism (those who seek the unity experience, to become ONE with THE ONE, Godhead, the one real Self, Buddha mind, Sophos, etc). History of Mysticism *was first published by Atma Books in 1987, now and is a unique compendium of the lives and teachings of the world's best known mystics. They are presented in chronological order, and include representatives of every religious tradition, revealing the broad universality of genuine religious experience. expanded and revised Thirtieth Anniversary edition is available as a free downloadable PDF document on this website at my Downloads page. This book is fundamental for seasoned scholars of philosophy and religion as well as anyone new to the study of Mysticism. (shrink)

In Heidegger’s Four Notebooks I and II (Black Notebooks 1947-1950), edited as volume 99 of the Gesamtausgabe of his writings, the author remarks that “One God, who as a unique God does not tolerate other Gods apart from him is outside divinity ”, the latter obviously referring to the Bible’s passage found in Exodus 34: 14 : “For you shalt worship no other God: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.”. But how does Heidegger come (...) to say that? How does he come to deny the divinity of the one God? This seems to be at first sight a radical criticism of the so-called ‘monotheism’. A major question remains unanswered, nonetheless: the sense in which the Jewish tradition focuses on the “One God”. In this context, “one” is actually not a number but a name. Far from being one of God’s attributes, it is God’s Name. It is a common ground that Heidegger had no access to the Hebrew text of the Bible, a biased situation which leads us to narrow-minded consequences regarding the ‘Old Testament’, where God is frequently called Elohim, i. e. a plural. Is the Jewish God exclusive, or rather Heidegger’s conception of Judaism restrictive? That is the question. (shrink)

Knowledge: to know is to love -- Love: Abraham, Moses, and the meaning of circumcision -- Seasons: Hanukah and Purim reconfigured -- Women: marital and universal peace -- Holiness: commandments as intruments -- Asseverations: socila responsibility and sanctifying God's name -- Agriculture: sanctifying all human beings -- Temple service: the divinity of the comandments -- Offerings: the morality of the commandments -- Reitual purity: intellectual and moral purity -- Damages: who is a Jew? -- Acquision: slavery versus universal humkanity (...) -- Civil laws: God of Aristotle in the God of Abraham -- Judges: Messianic universalism -- Appendix: Maimonides' cosmic paradigm. (shrink)

Interiority and Law presents a groundbreaking reassessment of a medieval Jewish classic, Baḥya ibn Paquda's Guide to the Duties of the Hearts. Michaelis reads this work anew as a revolutionary intervention in Jewish law, or halakha. Overturning perceptions of Baḥya as the shaper of an ethical-religious form of life that exceeds halakha, Michaelis offers a pioneering historical and conceptual analysis of the category of "inner commandments" developed by Baḥya. Interiority and Law reveals that Baḥya's main effort revolved around establishing a (...) new legal formation - namely, the "duties of the hearts" - which would deal entirely with human interiority. Michaelis takes up the implications of Baḥya's radical innovation, examining his unique mystical model of proximity to God, which he based on an increasingly growing fulfillment of the inner commandments. With an integrative approach that puts Baḥya in dialogue with other medieval Muslim and Jewish religious thinkers, this work offers a fresh perspective on our understanding of the interconnectedness of the dynamic, neighboring religious traditions of Judaism and Islam. Contributing to conversations in the history of religion, Jewish studies, and medieval studies on interiority and mysticism, this book reveals Baḥya as a revolutionary and demanding thinker of Jewish law. (shrink)

While Maimonides reread his sources to reconcile biblical and rabbinic texts with the demands of reason, Hermann Cohen, in his construction of a “religion of reason,” rereads Maimonides' rereadings of those very same texts. Maimonides' Judaism often bridges the sources toward Cohen's religion of reason by providing a philological anchor that nudges a term or verse now viewed through a more modern historical and evolutionary lens toward its ultimate reason-infused meaning. This paper will explore a hitherto neglected feature of (...) their oeuvres that unites Maimonides and Cohen as much as it distinguishes them: the “Jewishness” shared by both, as evident in the most Jewish of all exercises that suffuses both their works, biblical and midrashic exegesis. Their exegetical nets are systematically cast widely throughout the breadth of the Hebrew Bible, but more often than not they offer highly discrepant readings of the same passage or prooftext. Cohen's referencing of many of the same sources appeals to their Maimonidean rationalist refurbishment, but at the same time often places them in combative discourse in order to subvert and reorient Maimonides' exegesis. The notions of divine names, the “image” ( tselem ) of God, “nearness” to God, and divine “glory” ( kavod ) are closely examined to demonstrate this intertextual relationship between these two seminal Jewish thinkers. While Cohen may be misreading Maimonides' rereading of scripture, he remains a true hermeneutical disciple in his exegetical restructuring and realignment of scripture. Cohen's programmatic exegetical idealization of Maimonidean prooftexts to reconstruct a new Kantianized God forms a common ground of discourse with Maimonides that traverses seven centuries of a quintessential Jewish enterprise. (shrink)

Use of divine names is strictly regulated in the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Unlike most ordinary names, “God,” “Jesus,” and “Allah,” have a particular moral significance for the faithful. Misuse of the names constitutes a form of blasphemy—a sin. Tomes have been written about the origin of holy names in these traditions and the role that they play in devotional practices. I have no such grand theological ambitions here. Instead, in this short essay I will raise (...) a few more narrow questions about the sin of blasphemy from the standpoint of contemporary philosophy of language. Until we have good reason to think otherwise, we should assume that the best semantic theory for ordinary proper names like “Obama” and “Aristotle” extends to names for God. In particular, I think we have reason to assume some causal theory of reference is true of divine names, since some version of it seems true of most every other name. From this assumption I will argue (i) that there are some puzzles for the sin of blasphemy as it is traditionally conceived, and (ii) that we can make progress toward answering the puzzles by acknowledging that divine names are vulnerable to a special kind of reference drift. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Setting the Task Devoted to Destruction: Sanctified Violence and Judaism The Blood of the Lamb A Case Study in the Evolved Psychology of Religious Violence: 9/11.

Once the Luwian hieroglyphics for God “” and Gate “” were discovered at Göbekli Tepe, this author was able to directly link the site’s carved pillars and pillar enclosures to the Abrahamic/Mosaic “Word of God”,. Archaeologists and anthropologists have long viewed the Bible as mankind’s best guide to prehistoric religion, however, archaeologist Klaus Schmidt had no reason to believe that the site he spent years excavating at Göbekli Tepe might be the legendary “Pillars of Enoch”, carved by the first Biblical (...) holy man and scribe. To make this connection, the author first had to decipher Judaism’s Razah D’Oraytah (Secret of Knowledge) from the Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation). The Book of Creation is the only text to explain the Secret of Knowledge, and the only text attributed to the prophet Abraham within the rabbinical community. The Zohar, Judaism’s most accessible Kabbalistic text, admits that it lacks knowledge of “deep and hidden things which issue from God’s thought and are taken up by the Voice [of God] which are not disclosed till the Word [] reveals them”. Abrahamic/Mosaic “Word of God” encrypts the mathematics of sound that emanates from God’s “Voice” in terms of ancient string theory. Just as modern string theory defines a Theory of Everything (ToE) within theoretical physics, so too does this ancient string theory define the Theory of Everything that Abraham named the “Living God”. The author’s previous paper ties Jewish sources to Göbekli Tepe, while the current paper applies this sonic “God Table” to the textual exegesis and hermeneutics structuring all religious creation allegories, including the writings of Sumer, Assyria, Babylonia, Vedic India, pre-Dynastic Egypt, Ugarit, and Israel. This paper will apply Göbekli Tepe’s structural template to archaeology’s oldest legible cuneiform tablets, including the Kesh Temple Hymn, Sumerian King List, and the Akkadian Ark Tablet. It will also be demonstrated that Göbekli Tepe holds the key to the Rig Veda, Hinduism’s oldest text, and defines the essence of Plato’s metaphysics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 85 scientious search for principles of method (and of peace) may have been one of the reasons why he was suspect in England, as were the Ramist "methodists." In any case, it is quite clear now that Hobbes was not a materialist, not even when he was writing De Corpore. HERBERT W. SCHNEIDER Claremont, CallJornia Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary selections. Translated with an Introduction and (...) notes by Richard H. Popkin. (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co. Pp. xliv q- 456.) This new edition of selections from Pierre Bayle's famous Dictionnaire will be welcomed by historians and philosophers alike. In it we find a representative sample from the book that was both the inspiration and despair of much of eighteenth-century thought, and that still presents modem man with both questions and methodological acid that makes it difficult to find or accept "truth." The young readers who will meet Pierre Bayle for the first time in these pages will find him to be the skeptical philosopher, the ribald, sometimes lewd, even pornographic storyteller, the detached scholar who prowled through the history and the ideas of men, dissolving all certainty by analyses that peeled off layer after layer of belief until the core itself was exposed as naive or ridiculous. Had Professor Popkin done nothing more than provide us with these excellently chosen selections from the Dictionnaire, we would all be in his debt, for he gives us a chance easily to bring this important work to the attention of our students. But this volume is considerably more than simply a selection. Professor Popkin's Introduction is an important statement in the controversy over Bayle's personal beliefs and involvemeat. For more than two decades a large literature has portrayed Bayle in many different guises: for some he was still the skeptic who intentionally forged the weapons with which Voltaire and his colleagues assaulted the Judeo-Christian traditions of European men; at the other extreme he was a devout Huguenot who merely wanted to do for the Calvinist world what Bishop Huet and other Catholic skeptics did for the Catholic one, namely to prove the necessity of accepting the Christian beliefs on faith since absolute knowledge was impossible. Professor Popkin has learned Bayle's methodology too well to allow himself to be trapped by a simple explanation. He refuses to identify Bayle with a Kierkegaard or a Lamennais whose ideas would dissolve under Bayle's pen just as did Pascal's and Jurieu's. But where are we to find the secret of this man who lived out his life as a member of the French Reformed Church in Amsterdam while he unfolded the absurdity or naivet~ of every intelligible Christian theology? The problem becomes more perplexing when we note his obvious sympathy for both Manicheanism and Judaism. Could he have been the last of the Cathars or a secretly converted Jew? Popkin calls attention to Bayle's interest in and affection for Maimonides' work which he translates "Guide for the perplexed", but which could be translated "Guide for those who have lost their way" or in our parlance, "the derailed." In a way Bayle's Dictionnaire was itself a "Guide" for men in trouble with their beliefs. But Bayle's approach to this problem must be understood in light of his own discussion of religion "of the heart" and religion "of reason." Like Madame Labrousse, Popkin is much impressed by the simplicity of Bayle's last words, written on the day he died, in which he described himself as "a Christian philosopher convinced of and pierced with the mercies of God.... " The statement omits all the im~ portant theological propositions of Christian theology as well as any emotional feeling. We must see Pierre Bayle as an erudite, unemotional man whose "religion had no expressed or expressible content.., but was only in the heart in some quiet unemotional way.... " Popkin sees him as "a quite Erasmian scholar, living out his days in the city of Erasmus, examining man's intellectual heritage and intellectual world.., by patient erudition [undermining] man's intellectual frame of reference while remaining secure and tranquil in his unemotional religion of the heart." Since... (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name (...) for threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

This article deals with a highly debated text, namely 2 Maccabees 12, specifically the problematic verses (38–45) which contain a theology that is distinctly non-Jewish in import. Indeed, most recent scholars concerned with this passage do not seem to be unanimous apropos the best interpretation of the events that are described, resulting in a range of different opinions concerning, inter alia, the afterlife, purgatory and/or doctrinal disputes between Pharisees and Sadducees. By means of an interpretivist or constructivist epistemology, the authors (...) advocate that normally, traditional Judaism emphasises personal, individual responsibility and accountability, whereas in this text God is portrayed as requiring material, financial payment for wrongdoing and not individual תשובה [teshuvah]. This is in contradistinction to, inter alia, Exodus 30:11–16 and theologically Jewish ‘transgression’ has clearly metamorphosed into Christian ‘sin’. In addition, Judas Maccabeus seems to have retained a half-shekel methodology (employed for Jewish men of military age – soldiers) whilst emphasising the ‘atonement for your lives’ from Exodus 30:11–16 in a more literalistic, materialistic, non-Jewish sense whilst de-emphasising the real need to maintain the Temple as well as the proper, traditional rules of תשובה. (shrink)

La tradition juive imprègne à tel point le discours philosophique de Levinas qu'on a pu le soupçonner d'être une théologie masquée de la transcendance. L'ambiguïté n'est qu'apparente. Son judaïsme est la voix singulière d’un recommencement. Dans sa jeunesse talmudique à Vilna, il a été à l'école d'une si haute pensée de la grandeur excessive de Dieu qu'elle échappe à nos représentations et décourage la philosophie de s'en faire l'interprète. Arrivé en France, s'adonnant avec émerveillement à la phénoménologie, il apprend d'elle (...) que l'esprit n'est rien que liaison au dehors, échange avec le monde et ouverture à autrui. Pour elle, le monde repose fondamentalement sur l'expérience empirique de la rencontre de l'homme, non directement sur la relation à Dieu. Mais dans l'exploration de son domaine propre, celui de l'existence finie, la raison se heurte à des limites – la mort, le visage d'autrui – où surgit une altérité exigeante, qui se refuse aux réductions et aux accaparements dont la transcendance divine est l'objet dans les religions même révélées et qui dénonce les violences infligées aux hommes au nom du divin. Ainsi transformée par son écoute de l'illimité, la raison phénoménologique déplace la notion de révélation. Dans le visage se révèle la sainteté de la personne, avec la justice absolue qui lui est due ; dans la sainte écriture, la responsabilité suprême de chacun vis-à-vis de l'autre. L'homme en perte d'identité se découvre orienté par un souffle de transcendance, non vers une vérité absolue, mais vers un Dieu absent qui s'est retiré dans son incognito.The Jewish tradition impregnates the philosophical discourse of Levinas to such an extent that one suspects it to be a theology of transcendence in disguise. The ambiguity is only apparent. His Judaism is a unique voice of a new beginning. In his Talmudic youth in Vilna, Levinas was at a school with such a high idea of the excessive greatness of God that it escapes our representations and discourages philosophy to be its interpreter. When he arrived in France he gave himself up to the wonder of phenomenology. From it he learned that the spirit is nothing other than liaison to the outside, interchange with the world, and openness to the other. The world is fundamentally based on the empirical experience of man’s encounter, not directly on relation to God. But reason, in the exploration of its own domain, finite existence, meets its limits – death, the visage of the other– where a demanding alterity arises. This latter refuses reductions and monopolizations whose object is divine transcendence, even in revealed religions, and denounces violence inflicted on men in the name of the divine. Thus transformed by listening to the limitless, phenomenological reason displaces the notion of revelation. In the visage is revealed the holiness of the person, with the absolute justice that is due him ; in Holy Scripture we find the supreme responsibility of each one toward the other. Man, in losing his identity, finds himself oriented by a breath of transcendence, not towards an absolute truth, but towards an absent God who has drawn back into its incognito. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Institutional AuthorityA Christian PerspectiveTerrence MerriganIn a reflection that is intended to serve as a contribution to greater mutual understanding between religious traditions, it seems appropriate to begin by putting one’s best foot forward. When one receives a guest into one’s home, one usually makes an effort to do just that. One cleans and organizes one’s home, and even attempts to disguise, or at least to deflect attention away from, (...) the defects of one’s living space—the scratches on the furniture, for example, or the chair that has seen better days. If someday the guest becomes a friend, he or she will drop in unexpectedly and see how things look on a day-to-day basis. And when one feels completely at home with one’s friend, one will make no fuss at all when that friend comes by. Our friend, one assumes, will put the best possible face on the chaos they see. And we will trust them to be mild in their judgments on our household and our capacities as a homemaker.The following reflection on institutional authority within Christianity is structured in the light of the analogy of a friend’s visit to one’s home. Part 1 provides a description of the Christian “home,” that is to say, an outline of the most striking features of the Christian religion. This is, of course, inevitably, the view of a homeowner. Though the Christian home might not appeal to a non-Christian, it is important to know what it looks like. Part 2 aims to take the visitor into the heart of the Christian home. Of course, like every homeowner who welcomes a first-time visitor, the host will attempt to present their home at its best, that is to say, how the home looks when everything is in its place. Concretely, this means reflecting on how institutional authority is intended to function within the Christian community, how it—ideally—serves the goal of the Christian religion. Part 3 will deal with the impressions that a visitor might have of the Christian home if he or she were to drop by on a very busy weekday, when there are still a lot of chores to be done and there has been no time for housecleaning. In other words, this section will examine the way in which institutional authority works in practice and how this might appear to those members of the community who suffer under its exercise, as well as to those who are not part of the community to begin with. Finally, part 4 provides an analysis of how a member of the family or the community of the church might go about coping with the exercise of institutional authority. In other words, this section will reflect on what it is like to [End Page 133] live in a home where chaos seems to be order of the day and where the hope of ever having everything in its place is at best a very distant one. The goal here is to seek to make clear to the non-Christian visitor why, despite the chaos, a Christian can still feel at home in, and even cherish, the Christian family that is the church. But let us begin with the description of the Christian home.The Nature of the Christian ReligionOrthodox Christianity is perhaps best summarized in the proposition that God engages in a personal relationship with human beings in and through the processes of human history. Let us look more closely at the central notions that make up this proposition.The first notion that merits consideration is the description of God as “personal.” What Christianity claims (and this is the fruit of its roots in Judaism) is that the origin and goal of all that is, has disclosed itself to human persons as a Being possessed of “person-like characteristics,” such as “individuality, intelligence, and love.” 1The second notion that needs to be considered is that of “relationship.” The possibility of some sort of relationship between human beings and God is predicated on the first notion, namely, that God is in some sense “personal.” According to the Judeo-Christian... (shrink)

The article presents a sketch of the biography and work of Hermann Cohen, head of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism. It shows how wrong it is to think that Cohen reduced all philosophy to a theory of knowledge. At the same time, the theory of knowledge really occupied an important place in Cohen's system, and by knowledge he meant first of all mathematized natural science, although he paid attention to the notion of goal and its importance both for biology and (...) philosophical system, contributing to unification of the doctrine of knowledge and ethics. A peculiarity of Cohen's understanding of idealism is shown: the latter becomes fruitful only when it does not lose sight of that which is distinct from reason, constitutes a difficulty for it, and thus sets a task for it, namely sensual data. It is analyzed how Cohen saw such idealism in Plato and Kant, as well as in the scientific revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in particular in the crisis of mechanistic understanding of matter and in A. Einstein's theory of relativity. The origins of Cohen's understanding of continuity, reality and their connection, as well as his understanding of the thing-in- itself are considered. Attention is drawn to the connection between Cohen's understanding of the infinite task of knowledge (approximation to the thing-in-itself) and his idea of humanity. The development of this idea in Cohen's ethics and aesthetics is presented. Transcendental freedom (as a thing-in-itself in general), from his point of view, cannot be a given distinctive feature of the subject, but remains an infinite task facing humanity as a whole. More details is given on Cohen's philosophy of religion, which became the final part of his system. Cohen defines his own notion of the religion of reason and explains its distinction from ethics. Religion of reason recognizes the irreducible self of the Other, repentance, redemption, and renewal. Although the religion of reason belongs to all humanity, it first begins to form and develop in Judaism. The Cohenian understanding of God, the religion of reason as ethical monotheism and the idea of the correlation between God and man are analyzed. It is shown that ethical monotheism in Cohen's understanding culminates in the idea of messianism. (shrink)

This contribution aims at deconstructing a Christian master narrative that interprets Josephus as crucial support for the New Testament message that the Temple had to become a ruin, in line with the will of God. It argues for an alternative interpretation, namely that both Jesus of Nazareth and Josephus considered the Temple to be still relevant, albeit in different ways. For Jesus the Temple was the self-evident cultic centre of Judaism and a special place to experience his relationship with (...) God. None of Jesus’ statements about the Temple in their original context necessarily implies that Jesus assumed that the institution of the Temple would stop functioning in the near future or at the end of time. Josephus’s perspective on the Temple changes in his works. The elaborate description of Jerusalem and the Temple in War 5 reads as a written monument of the past, but several passages in Josephus’s Antiquities and Against Apion imply that the Temple was still important after 70 CE. Josephus may have reckoned with the possibility that the Temple was going to be rebuilt if the Romans allowed for it.This contribution is dedicated to Pieter G.R. de Villiers, a modest but sophisticated scholar and a good friend. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 489 universe enjoys as an ordered whole. What happens if the model does not present a universal order, as seems to have been the case for the last three centuries? Should we then remove the corresponding perfection from our idea of universe's perfection? Or is there some metaphysical reason for asserting that the universe is an ordered whole, regardless of any particular model? If the latter, it (...) would be interesting to have at least a sketch of how we would arrive at this position. On the whole, certainly, the book provides an invaluable overview of the Thomistic universe for anyone working on Aquinas's cosmology, metaphysics, or even ethics. Blanchette is to be commended for his clear and orderly presentation of the material, especially the many subdivisions within the chapters. The quotations of Thomistic texts are almost all in English, well translated by Banchette himself. The placing of key phrases in Latin within parentheses helps in some measure to overcome the lack of the original text in the footnotes. Finally, the book's selected bibliography as well as its indices (index of names, analytical index, and index of citations) render the book an even more useful tool. The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. DAVID M. GALLAGHER Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions. By DAVID B. BURRELL, C.S.C. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993. Pp. xi + 225. $29.95 (cloth). According to the author, this book, Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions, is a comparative work designed "to illustrate the worth of explicitly tradition-directed inquiry, as well as the fruitfulness of comparative inquires in philosophical theory" (6). In addition, among other things, the author contends that, "because the pressure of comparative perspectives demands that we mine hitherto unsuspected reaches of what we have thought we know," not only the author but also the "traditional disciplines of philosophy and theology may each be enriched by the forays of such inquiry" (6). Specifically, the three traditions to which Burrell is referring are the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian; and, as the title of this book suggests, the central topics of consideration used as the basis for a comparison among these traditions are the respective notions of freedom and creation. In order to achieve his goals, Burrell places his discussion within the general context of the notion of creation, which, as he rightly observes, "is notoriously difficult to classify" (7). In so doing, he divides the work into nine chapters; which he entitles as follows: 1) "The Context: Creation"; 2) "On 490 BOOK REVIEWS Characterizing the Creator"; 3) "On Characterizing Creation"; 4) "On Characterizing the Relation: Jewish, Christian, Muslim"; 5) "God's Acting in the World God Creates"; 6) "Creatures Acting in a Created World"; 7) "On the Relations between the Two Actors"; 8) "Sin and Redemption"; 9) "The God Realized in Renewed Creation." Having placed his discussion within the general context of the notion of creation, Burrell begins his analysis by comparing and contrasting this notion in St. Thomas and Moses Maimonides vis-a-vis the necessitarianism of Aristotle as interpreted by lbn Sina. In so doing, Burrell stresses that what predominates in both Maimonides and Aquinas is a notion of God as a "free originator" of all creation not in relation to an "exegesis of the opening chapters of Genesis" but in relation "to the rest of the Bible and the subsequent tradition of Judaism and Christianity" (12). This "distillation" having been noted, Burrell then examines the distinctive features of the notion of creation as this is influenced by the "faith assertion " of the three respective religious traditions-Jewish, Christian, and Islamic. Within Judaism Burrell finds emphasis placed upon the need to interpret creation against the background of the "covenant" with Israel (19). In Aquinas and Barth he understands this activity to be interpreted against the background of the relation of the Father to His Eternal Word (19-21); and within Islam he finds the regulating theme in the conviction of God's absolute sovereignty vis-a-vis the created order. In chapter 2, Burrell goes into more precise detail regarding the specific ways in which God is characterized as a creator within the... (shrink)

In the polemical literature against Judaism, it is stated that Islam is the last religion, Prophet Muhammad was foretold in the Bible, and the Bible is distorted. Among the authors of such works, there are many who embraced Islam from Jews and Christians. Through their works, these converts show Muslims how serious they are in embracing Islam. In this article, the treatise under the evaluation was first brought to the agenda in 1867 by Gustav Flügel (d. 1870). Flügel claimed (...) that the author of the treatise was a Spanish or Moroccan convert Jew named Rakili. However, recent researches have revealed that Rakili is the name of the copyist and the author is an unknown Jew. Due to the Hebrew words in the text of the treatise, the author is thought to be a Jewish convert. The author of the treatise makes use of intensive quotations from Tanakh. However, it seems that the criticism of the treatise is not as strong as Ibn Hazm. The author also quotes from the Jewish oral tradition. Although the author is thought to be a Jewish convert, it is difficult to say that there is a very strong polemic of Judaism. Rather than showing that the Torah has been tampered with, using the passages of Tanakh, he wants to demonstrate that the Israelites went astray. In doing so, he tries to refute the Jewish claim of chosenness. Instead of stating that the Jews were not at the point of religious representation of God’s message, the author claims that Muhammad's followers were the addressees of this election. This method, which we occasionally encounter in other polemical treatises, appears as a much more intense and central agenda in this treatise. The most original aspect of this treatise at issue is the Ishmael-Isaac, Hagar-Sarah and Moses- Muhammad comparisons. The author insistently emphasizes that the chosen line is not the lineage of Isaac, but the lineage of Ishmael. As a natural consequence of this, he tries to prove that Muhammad is the greatest prophet to be obeyed and followed. What is interesting here is that the author, as a Jewish convert, tried to refute the idea of the chosennes of Jewish nation. According to him, there is an election not through Sarah and Isaac, but through Hagar and Ishmael. It is seen that those who have converted do such things both to prove their sincerity and to be accepted by Muslim administrators. The author’s glorifications of the Prophet Muhammad and his miracles by scorning Moses' miracles and Jewish ancestors can be described as an extreme attitude in this sense. The author also devotes a place to the subject of Biblical prophecies about the Prophet Muhammad. In this part, the author of the treatise stated that the gematria (abjad) value of some words in the Torah and the word Muhammad are equal. He claims that there are passages pointing to Muhammad. However, these passages are known in the polemical literature and are issues that were mentioned before the author. Apart from these widely known passages, there are some other passages he quoted. But these passages are also based on strained interpretations. Again, in some passages he quoted from Tanakh, it is seen that he was flexible and not loyal to the text. One of the points that the author dwells upon is the sins committed by the Israelites and the curses that were inflicted on them. The author of treatise supports this with passages different from Tanakh. Drawing attention to the fact that the Jews were cursed in their own books, which they consider sacred, the author tries to show that a nation so cursed cannot be a chosen people. The author, contrary to the Jews' expectation of the Messiah, points out that Jesus will come back, break the cross, kill the pig, and rule the earth. The writer, who reported the hadith that the Jews would be killed in the End Times, even reports that when the Jews hid behind the stones, the stones would say "There is a Jew behind me, come and kill". According to him, the time for Jews to repent has passed, because they could not take this opportunity by denying Muhammad either. The author has an interesting explanation as to why the hereafter and resurrection are not mentioned in the Torah. According to this claim, when God sent down the Torah to Moses, he ordered the Israelites to keep their orders and refrain from their prohibitions. Since God knows the hardness and stubbornness of the hearts of the Israelites, that most of them are devilish, engaged in magic and pagan cults, and prefer the world to the hereafter, he did not mention the issues such as heaven, hell, reward and punishment in the Torah. On the contrary, in many parts of the Torah, God said to them if you keep my orders, your sustenance will increase, your generation will increase, fertility will increase, and you will win victories over your enemies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On (Im)Patient MessianismMarx, Levinas, and DerridaChung-Hsiung Lai (bio)In the past few decades a group of well-known thinkers and rising-star scholars within the field of continental philosophy have come together to rethink what “the messianic” might mean. From Levinas’s reading of the Talmud and Franz Rosenzweig, and Derrida’s work on Marx and Levinas, to Agamben’s reading of Benjamin and Saint Paul, and Žižek’s work on Saint Paul and Derrida, among (...) others, it is now possible to detect what Arthur Bradley and Paul Fletcher call “a messianic turn” in continental thought. To contribute to this ongoing “messianism” dialogue, this chapter aims to examine what could be termed “(im) patient messianism,” as illustrated in the writings of Marx, Levinas, and Derrida. Although these three philosophers are of Jewish decent (and all of them inherited the concept of Jewish messianism), they develop different, and yet intersecting, messianisms in their philosophies. While Marx’s political philosophy demands an impatient messianism entailing an impending apocalypse intended to achieve social justice, Levinas’s ethical messianism requires absolute patience to pursue justice for the Other in infinity. Resorting to both Levinasian ethics and Marxist politics, Derrida’s spectral (im)patient messianism attempts to [End Page 59] demonstrate the possibility of moving from the ethical to the political without returning to the mire of either ontology or theology. Nevertheless, all three thinkers have problems associated with their messianic beliefs. Simplifying to the extreme, I define (im)patient messianism as the dynamic of a three-dimensional humanism that will be explained in the conclusion after the analysis of (im)patient messianism in the works of the three messianic thinkers.Jewish Messianism and the Messianic Now“What is the messianic? Where does it come from? And why speak of the messianic now? It is, on the face of it, difficult to imagine anything less contemporary — more untimely — than talk of Messiahs, redeemers, chosen people, last judgement.... Yet, paradoxically, it might be precisely this radical sense of untimeliness — of ever becoming ‘timely’ or happening ‘now’ — that represents the messianic’s greatest value of our time, to ‘now-time.’... In other words, the messianic now might actually be something that enables us to think, write and perhaps even judge our ‘now’ otherwise.”1The word Messiah is derived from the Hebrew mashah (“the anointed”) and refers to an eschatological redeemer, a savior, of a group of people. In Difficult Freedom, Levinas points out “messianism in the strong sense of the term has been compromised in the Jewish consciousness since Emancipation, ever since Jews participated in world history” (DF 96). In “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,” Gershom Scholem also claims that “Judaism, in all its forms and manifestations, has always maintained a concept of redemption as an event which takes place publicly, on the stage of history and within the community.”2 Messianism appears “as a living force in the world of Judaism.”3 In truth, the idea of messianism originated in Judaism and is also used in the other Abrahamic religions, namely Christianity and Islam. According to Jewish eschatology, the Messiah is a king or High Priest, traditionally anointed with holy oil to be the ruler of God’s Kingdom. After a series of wars and disasters, [End Page 60] God will send the Messiah to redeem the Jewish people and the world, taking the Jews back to Israel and rebuilding Jerusalem. Specifically, this future Jewish Messiah is thought to be a human leader,4 physically descended from the paternal Davidic line through King David5 and King Solomon,6 who will usher in the Messianic Age of peace for Israel and all the nations of the world. At this time, enemies will become friends, the wicked will abandon evil and do good, so the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the child shall play with the beasts.7Since the Jews have suffered thousands of years of persecution and diaspora, the arrival of the Messiah has become an important concept in their eschatology and living tradition. The messianic is actually a matter of promise, advent, waiting, hope, and redemption. Hence, it... (shrink)

On the background and within the framework of the traditional Israelite-Jewish anthropology Ben Sira advises his pupils and readers to accept death as a fate and to draw the consequences of the fact that human beings have no other life than the present one. For the Lord the shortness of human life gives reason for his mercy, if they return to his commands. On the other hand the way a man dies is a parameter for God's judgement. Apart from the (...) fact that everybody is responsible for his fate the transitory character of life gives reason to enjoy oneself using his property for gifts to his friend and the embellishment of the own transitory days. But he should as well take care of his name, for a good name is just what may survive. In regard to the death of other people one should not withdraw from a dying, but after his death not lengthen the mourning for this would weaken himself whithout helping the dead one. This in the whole conservative outlook of Ben Sira protected him against philosophical and apocalpytic speculations, which he judged as devorced from reality. All what a humans may need for their life became revealed to them by the Lord. To act according to his commandments is better than to look out for fresh revelations. So we may understand Ben Sira as a representative of Judaism as a religion of reason in a transitional age, even if we would credit to his unnamed opponents that they had some idea about the transcendent mystery of life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Circumcision:Ordinary and Universal in My CommunityAllan J. JacobsMy1 circumcision experiences are remarkable mostly for their ordinariness. My wife Danaë gave birth to our son Perseus2 while I was a resident in obstetrics and gynecology in a city where we had no family. Perseus was circumcised in a Jewish brit milah3 ceremony on the eighth day of his life, as were my wife's and my male ancestors back into ancient (...) times. We were relieved because Perseus had just recovered from a potentially serious condition. After a difficult forceps delivery, his blood bilirubin rose almost to the point where he might have developed the dreaded kernicterus syndrome. Kernicterus can cause permanent severe motor, intellectual and visual impairment. It was unclear whether he would be discharged from the hospital in time. He had to spend a week in restraints under a bright light whose frequency degraded bilirubin. Happily, he came home the day before the scheduled brit.Our four parents attended the brit. Danaë's father was the sandek,4 being granted the honor of holding our son on his lap during the circumcision ceremony. The mohel, or circumciser, was the local Conservative rabbi. We were mildly anxious because he didn't do many circumcisions in this city with few Jews. Perseus cried briefly after he was circumcised. The circumcision undoubtedly was far less stressful than treatment of elevated bilirubin. The circumcision certainly was less painful than the prodding and sticks for the many blood tests he had to undergo in the hospital, not to mention the pain of his difficult forceps delivery. Perseus did not seem to have much discomfort in his penis afterward, and had no circumcision complications.After the brit, our parents and my resident colleagues ate refreshments and chatted for an hour or so. A brit milah is a happy occasion, but not an elaborate one. It marks the end of the joy, anxiety, and excitement of the child's birth and its aftermath and is followed by the less exalted rhythm of feedings, diaper changes, and sleep deprivation.At the brit, our boys are assigned Hebrew names and confirmed in the Biblical covenant between God and the Hebrew people established between God and Abraham, and reaffirmed between God and Moses. Regardless of the historical truth of the formation of the covenant, it is accepted as a myth tantamount to [End Page 71] truth. In other words, regardless of its literal truth, such a myth is to be regarded as true because it concretizes God's demands or a moral truth. The covenant is real for me whether or not there was a historical Abraham. As with other religious commitments, the obligation to circumcise our sons is unprovable, but binding. On this basis, Perseus's ancestors on both sides were circumcised in brit milah ceremonies for many centuries into the past.My two grandsons were circumcised as well. Achilles was circumcised among friends and relatives. The mohel was an experienced obstetrician who was certified to officiate at a brit milah following the practices of Conservative Judaism. He administered adequate analgesia with topical local anesthetic cream followed by an injected regional block. Achilles slept through his circumcision, suffered no complications, and had little discomfort afterward. My other grandson had a circumcision performed as an infant outside the context of Judaism and is not being raised as a Jew.The two brit milah in my family were beautiful, dignified ceremonies, welcoming the infants into the Jewish fold, and bestowing their Hebrew names.5 Some of my relatives, including Perseus's son, had circumcisions performed in a medical setting without a ceremony. None of the many boys in my family had obvious short- or long-term problems with their circumcisions. My social circle has many Reform and Conservative Jews. I have never heard any Jewish man in my circle of acquaintances complain about his circumcision. Circumcision is a given. Problems are rare, and an exposed glans is the norm. Our men typically enjoy sex and have no difficulty in fathering children. Circumcision is part of the comforting cocoon of custom and tribe that helps to protect us as a group. It also reinforces Jewish endogamy... (shrink)

Since the beginning of human history, there has been no society that did not have any religion. Man meets his need to believe, encoded in his nature by turning to God. God has not left humans alone in their journey on earth, and from time to time, He has intervened in the world through his prophets. The prophethood, which constitutes one of the main subjects of theology, is an important institution in God-human communication. The messengers chosen by God convey to (...) people the information that they received through revelation and offer teachings that will bring them to salvation. The idea of salvation by God when suffering or feeling helpless has driven people to the expectation of a savior. Nearly all religions except Shintoism have the awaited savior belief in the world. Accordingly, the savior will emerge in an environment of chaos where disasters are experienced, and a moral collapse is observed. The expected savior will drive people away from this turmoil, bring them happiness, well-being, and lead them to salvation. Although there is a savior belief in Judaism and Christianity, Muslims claim that the awaited savior in these religions is Muhammad. Muslim thinkers who believe that Muhammad was heralded in previous scripts, tried to find evidence on the subject from the Bible. One of the Islamic scholars who did researches for this purpose is Shamsuddin al-Samarqandi. Shamsuddin Mohammed b. Ashraf al-Husayni al-Samarqandi is an important Turkish-Islamic scholar who lived in Turkestan at the end of the 7th century and the first quarter of the 8th century. Samarqandi is a versatile scholar who produced important works in various fields such as philosophy, logic, mathematics, discussion, debate and astronomy. Shamsuddin al-Samarqandi is one of the eminent scholars who have written his name in the history of science and philosophy with his works. He adopted a critical and analytical style in almost every field, putting the science of logic at the center of his system. His constructive criticisms had an important function in understanding and interpreting the ideas of numerous thinkers, from Greek philosophers to Islamic philosophers and representatives of philosophical theology. In addition to all these, Samarqandi did not hesitate to criticize the Christian and Jewish belief systems, religions such as Sanawiyyah and Zoroastrianism, and the teachings of the naturalist philosophers regarding the relationship between God and the world in the light of rational and scriptural evidence. Samarqandi, who distinguished himself in rational sciences, also showed himself with his background in theology. Due to his exceptional intellectual interest, he analyzes some key concepts and divine codes related to the Bible, making original inferences about the loyalty of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. Samarqandi interprets some passages of the Torah and the New Testament, which he considers as signs of Muhammad's prophethood, in the axis of language, logic and the rules of shariah, and concludes that Muhammad is the last prophet to be announced. The conceptual framework that he mostly focuses on in this regard contains Mount Paran, Paraklite, comparison with Moses, and the good news given to the Ishmaelites. Samarqandi makes inferences about the environment in which Muhammad appeared, his qualities, and his lineage, based on the aforementioned concepts. Samarqandi also responds to the criticisms raised by the Ahl al-Kitab about the principles, such as the abolition of other religious rules constituting the basis of Muhammad's legitimacy and establishment of Islam instead, and him being a universal prophet. An important privilege of Samarqandi is that he not only grounds his claims on a theoretical scale but also engages in debates with the leaders of the Ahl al-Kitab. Although Samarqandi exhibits a satisfactory analytical attitude in most of his claims, he displays a sophisticated approach based on the method of coercion (ilzām) in some of his claims. Although he adheres to the tradition of beshair al-nubuwwah in general, he gives a different perspective and strong reasoning to the same evidence within the tradition with the effect of his identity as a verifier (muhaqqik). (shrink)

Ex interiore ipso exeas. Preface. This book reconstructs the history of a still open dialectics between several ethoi, that is, shared codes of unwritten rules, moral traditions, or self-aware attempts at reforming such codes, and ethical theories discussing the nature and justification of such codes and doctrines. Its main claim is that this history neither amounts to a triumphal march of reason dispelling the mist of myth and bigotry nor to some other one-way process heading to some pre-established goal, but (...) instead to a chain of controversies where the partners’ will to win unintentionally yields a wealth of insights on human existence that has still something to teach us. -/- 1. The Hellenic moral tradition. -/- Two different traditions of morality in vi-v century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. -/- 2. Plato and the Good. -/- Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates rejoinder to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 3. Aristotle and practical philosophy. -/- Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistency in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater families, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics, is illustrated. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexes, or ‘dispositions’. Prudence, or better, practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with boùleusis or deliberation is discussed, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 4. Cynics and Stoics: ethics as therapy. -/- The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place that was given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of the science of well-being aiming, more than pleasure understood as in the popular view, the reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Roman and Imperial Moralists. -/- The chapter is dedicated to the reconstruction of a particular kind of literature, whose specific features have long been under-stressed, namely the Roman and Imperial moral literature. Cicero is treated at some length, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is given pride of place, stressing the novelty of his approach to ethics as cognitive therapy, in this case just following an already existing new wave of interest after nineteenth-century oblivion justified by alleged lack of authentic ‘philosophical’ character. -/- 6. The Hebrew moral tradition. -/- A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torah (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Levitic is stressed as the turning point when the stress on mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, starts being combined with legal tradition yielding the change in the sensibility of the Second Temple time. -/- 7. Second Temple Judaism. -/- This chapter describes the Long March leading from the post-exile Zadokite restoration to the first-century aevi vulgaris. The first topic reconstructed is the Zadokite theology of the double retribution. The second is the alternative Enochic tradition consistently rejecting the central role of the Temple, the Priesthood and worship as atonement for sins and offering as an alternative God’s unlimited mercy and preaching mercy, not sacrifice as the way of behaving requested by God. Wisdom literature, the third subject discusses, is a kind of third way, on the one hand increasingly critical towards the double retribution and ruling theology’s optimism facing the world as it is and on the other mocking at the Enochic current as a band of dreamers and visionaries. The third way consists in disenchantment facing the word as it is combined with a refusal of vain and childish hope of prizes for the righteous, suggesting instead the leading idea of right deeds for righteousness’s sake. Rabbi Hillel, Rabbi Yeshua and Philo of Alexandria are described as the three leading figures at the culminating point of such process of emergence of a new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This starting point consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, whose meaning is, arguably, more consistent than a long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine made us believe. And Christian morality, vis-à-vis allegedly legalist ‘Ancient Testament’ teachings, is less of a novelty than most early Christian writers announced. -/- 8. Talmudic moral doctrines and proto-Christian paraenesis. -/- The first three sections examine the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirke Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deot, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexes and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was "the tool by which the world was built"; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous, but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The last two sections examine first the various Christian currents and then Gnostic para-Christian or non-Christian currents as well as Manicheism. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure, purest Judaism. The last section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manicheism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. -/- 9. Christianity as “philosophy”. -/- The chapter reconstructs the stormy story of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and several rhetorical topics from the Stoic and Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua himself had been influenced by cynical preachers, is a proof of the necessity to translate the original Christian message in a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 10. Ethics in the Arabic-Islamic Philosophy. -/- The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on the retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince, had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries, a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with the disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 11. Ethics in the Jewish philosophy. -/- The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place for the first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed too a few traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Tora and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirke Avot could be translated. -/- 12. The practical philosophy revival in Latin Europe. -/- A reconstruction is carried out of a fresh start of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium rescuing a Platonic and Augustinian legacy, with Anselm and Peter Abelard. In this phase remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions, gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of a full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. -/- 13. Scholastic practical philosophy: Thomas Aquinas. -/- Aquinas’s ethics is theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to the repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave pure nature incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too ambitious, and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Prima Secundae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas was able to solve the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from the knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethics, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of the death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not the Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is no way an ethical ‘absolutism’, as both the traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularists tend to believe, but rather an ethic of prudential judgment on the individual case. Exceptions to this approach – or better the result of logical fallacies – are provided by the thesis of the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of so-called intrinsically evil acts, a thesis that would simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences that Thomas did not live long enough to draw. -/- 14. Scholastic practical philosophy: John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. A reconstruction is carried out of the ethical doctrines by both most authoritative Franciscan doctors. Their continuity with Aquinas is vindicated against prejudice carried by centuries of polemics within the Catholic Church and tendentious disparaging of both as forerunners of execrable Reformation. Besides aspects of continuity, also the important novelties are illustrated, first John’s abandonment of Aquinas’s and Augustine’s eudemonism, asserting righteousness for righteousness’s sake, and then William’s explicit defence of the philosopher’s virtues, that is, natural morality, and his solution to the dilemma of God’s omnipotence and the universal validity of natural law extending to God himself. -/- 15. Aristotelianism interpreted by the Magistri Artium. -/- A reconstruction of the until recently forgotten ethical doctrines by the Parisian Magistri Artium, falsely depicted as ‘Averroists’ and either deprecated as heretics or mistaken for predecessors of modern secularism. In fact, they illustrate a view of ‘natural’ virtue as may be understood by human reason without the assistance by Revelation. -/- Etiamsi daremus Deum non esse. Intermediate considerations. Three considerations may be suggested by the story told in the book. The first one is that intellectual histories have been mounted in the past with the same state of mind as one may mount a war chariot. Such constructions are not very helpful as tools for understanding the past. Wars waged in the past have left the field obstructed by ruins not easy to remove even by those historians who have animated by an impartial academic motivation. They have been influenced too by consequences of past emphasis on some authors and damnatio capitis suffered by others, by stratifications left on sources by secondary literature and translations, by allotment of originally close sources to different literary genres, by the monopolization of religious texts by churches with full cooperation by secular scholars who still fear contamination. The second one is that aware or unaware ethnocentrism has carried various calamities to our comprehension of the past. Their last vestiges have surfaced again in the semi-scholarly discussion on the idea of Europe occasioned by the debate on a project of a European Constitution. Mention of Europe’s Christian roots has been the clumsiest move. Proclamations of such roots were so obvious in what they affirmed as they were totally off-path concerning what they omitted, namely that he modern European moral tradition included legacies from Middle-Eastern wisdom, Hellenic philosophy, Roman Imperial legal literature, and, besides, a Jewish legacy in turn incorporating other more ancient Middle-Eastern legacies and which has been partly conveyed by Christianity. And the Islamic-Arabic philosophy too, in so far it made the Nicomachean Ethics available to Latin Christian scholars, is one more of Europe’s roots. The third is that religious traditionalists and secularist fundamentalists have gone hand in hand for a couple of centuries in either extolling or deprecating the allegedly Modern idea of Ethics without God, first formulated by Hugo Grotius with the claim that natural law would still be valid ‘etiamsi daremus – quod sine summo scelere dari potest – Deum non esse’. The facts are, firstly, that this is not an irreligious claim and Grotius was just a pious and meek Christian and, secondly, that it is not a ‘modern’ claim but rather one more formulation of the claim that there is a natural morality, independent of divine revelation, a claim shared by Moshe ben Maimon, Aquinas and William of Ockham. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to consider Jewish philosophy in opposition to the anti-ocularcentrism that defined the German Jewish philosophical tradition after Kant, namely the idea that Judaism—or at least its philosophical expression in Maimonidean philosophy—is aniconic and cognitively abstract. I do so by attempting to rethink the epistemic-veridical place of the imagination and visual experience in the Guide of the Perplexed . Once the imagination has been disciplined by reason, is there any cognitive status to an image or (...) sound that the eye or the ear perceives, and to that mental faculty that combines and recombines such impressions? Is the sight or sound of revelation a hallucination or just a mere figure of speech? Does it bear any relation to a spiritual reality external to the human mind and finite physical existence? To address these questions I explore the visual images, both iconic and aniconic-abstract, that distinguish the Guide . There is no getting past the visual imagination, although I am not sure Maimonides would have recognized it as such. Even when he leaves behind figurative visual cues such as the false image-work of the undisciplined imagination or the appearance of angels and images of God found in lower grades of prophecy, he turns to another visual register, namely the “abstract art“ of pure, dazzling light. In regard to these questions, Maimonides was more Greek than German, ascribing, cautiously, penultimate cognitive status to the visual imagination. (shrink)

It is suggested that the impetus to generate models is probably the most fundamental point of connection between mysticism and psychology. In their concern with the relation between ‘unseen’ realms and the ‘seen’, mystical maps parallel cognitive models of the relation between ‘unconscious’ and ‘conscious’ processes. The map or model constitutes an explanation employing terms current within the respective canon. The case of language mysticism is examined to illustrate the premise that cognitive models may benefit from an understanding of the (...) kinds of experiences gained, and explanatory concepts advanced, within mystical traditions. Language mysticism is of particular interest on account of the central role thought to be played by language in relation to self and the individual's construction of reality. The discussion focuses on traditions of language mysticism within Judaism, in which emphasis is placed on the deconstruction of language into primary elements and the overarching significance of the divine Name. Analysis of the detailed techniques used suggests ways in which multiple associations to any given word/concept were consciously explored in an altered state. It appears that these mystics were consciously engaging with what are normally preconscious cognitive processes, whereby schematic associations to sensory images or thoughts are activated. The testimony from their writings implies that these mystics experienced distortions of the sense of self , which may suggest that, in the normal state, ‘I’ is constructed in relation to the preconscious system of associations. Moreover, an important feature of Hebrew language mysticism is its emphasis on embodiment -- specific associations were deemed to exist between the letters and each structure of the body. Implications, first, for the relationship between language and self, and, second, for the role of embodiment in relation to self are discussed. The importance of the continual emphasis on the Name of God throughout the linguistic practices may have provided a means for effectively replacing the cognitive indexing function hypothesized here to be normally played by ‘I’ with a more transpersonal cognitive index, especially in relation to memory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 33.2 (2005) 71-97 [Access article in PDF] The Subject of Religion Lacan and the Ten Commandments Kenneth Reinhard Julia Reinhard Lupton Despite Freud's Nietzschean unmasking of religion as ideology, psychoanalysis has frequently been attacked as itself a religion, a cabal of analyst-priests dedicated to the worship of a dead master. Such critics "do not believe in Freud" in much the same way as atheists "do not believe in (...) God," and their rejections of psychoanalysis in the name of the secular partake in the very structure of religious thought they claim to repudiate. In Seminar XXI: Les non-dupes errent, Lacan comments on the blindness of the atheistic insight concerning religion: "I know that you're not believers, right? But that doesn't mean that you aren't all the more conned... because even if you are not believers, you still believe in that aspiration [for the love of God]. I won't say that you suppose it; rather, it supposes you" [Dec. 18, 1973; our trans.]. In Lacan's analysis, it is not that secular intellectuals suffer from unexamined religious "suppositions" or assumptions, to be swept away through a little ideology-critique or time on the couch. The case is rather, in Lacan's strong formulation, that religious discourse supposes us—supports and underwrites our very structures of being, subjectivity, and social interaction. That is, the secular subject is produced by the religious discourses that precede and continue to speak through it; the challenge for the contemporary critic is not to silence or debunk those discourses, but rather to bring the modern subject to assume responsibility for their enunciation.Throughout the decades of his seminar, Lacan addressed the monotheistic foundations of Western subjectivity as a set of discursive ruptures or cuts which continue to scar and brand the modern subject beyond their secular abrogation. Distinguishing between Freud "the individual with his atheistic profession of faith" and "the Freud who was the first to acknowledge the value and relevance of [the] myth... we call the death of God" [S VII 192–93], Lacan insists that Freud regarded monotheism as an epochal divide that irrevocably altered all that came before and after it: "On the left of this [monotheistic] message, there are some things that are henceforth outdated, obsolete; they no longer hold beyond the manifestation of the message. On the right, things are quite different" [172]. What, in Lacan's analysis, is the difference that monotheism has made, both during its periods of dominance and after? The laws, narratives, and symbols of monotheism continue to undergird key fantasies of personhood, nationhood, and neighborhood in the modernity that purports to have supplanted them. In Lacan's formulation, monotheism "supposes" the subject of these fantasies, precipitating it from out of the expanse of signifiers and in relation to a sublime object of both unbearable enjoyment and social obligation. Moreover, it is the scandal and the gift of monotheism that it not only creates moments of traumatic singularity, but also thinks the singular as trauma, rending the fabric of an animistic nature which would unite every polarity of being in the fullness of a sexual relation. Unlike the gods of Greek philosophy, the monotheistic God is not part of the nature he creates. In its decisive thinking of singularity, monotheism elicits and eludes all rapprochement with philosophical conceptions of the One, whether in the guise of Hellenized Judaism, Pauline theology, or Arab Aristotelianism. Lacan extends the monotheistic project of thinking singularity [End Page 71] by insisting that "there is something of One" [il y a de l'Un]—not the self-identical One of Greek logic, mathematics, and cosmology, but the One of a violent rupture that creates subjects and their worlds around a void, an un that un-does the primacy it speaks.If, from the Lacanian vantage, the singular invention of the God shared by the People of the Book forever separates religion from philosophy, we would also insist that religion is not simply a subset of "culture," understood as the symbolic practices that unify a people... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:FROM SACRIFICIAL VIOLENCE TO RESPONSIBILITY: THE EDUCATION OF MOSES IN EXODUS 2-4 Sandor Goodhart Purdue University When toward the end of his life Moses tried to stave off death, God said to him: "Did I tell you to slay the Egyptian?" (Midrash in Plaut 383) I. Education in Plato and Judaism The word "education", of course, comes from the Latin, educare, meaning "to lead out" or "to bring (...) up," and both its Latinate morphology and the semantic value it assumes in English reflect its peculiar history. To "lead out" implies in the first place leadership, which is to say a relationship between one designated as a "leader" and another (or others) designated as the "led." The notion of leadership also entails a movement through which the leader propels the led, namely from a region designated as "inside," to another designated as "outside." Within the Western context, which is to say, within the Western European historical experience which traces itselfback through the romance language speaking countries to Rome and ultimately to Greece, the primary articulator ofthe notion of education we have inherited is, of course, Plato. Although Plato's Republic is nominally about justice, and even more specifically the "just" state, commentators have long pointed out that it is really about education (see, for example, Havelock). How shall the guardians ofthe state that we shall term "just" be educated?, Plato's interlocutors ask themselves. In this regard, of course, Plato was challenging the educational system already in place at the time at the head of which was Homer and the Homeric epics, and substituting for an older oral culture founded on an elaborate system of mnemonics another founded more decisively upon writing and the alphabet. Some have argued that in place of a aural or Sandor Goodhart1 3 hearing-centered culture Plato was inaugurating a visual or video-centric cultural organization, and much work is currently being done in this area (see, for example, Ong). What was Plato's educational solution? It was an appeal, in short, to the true, to the language of reason, and to the realm of the ontological as the context in which the true could be defined. The true, as the phenomenological tradition has taught us, may be regarded as the separation of that which has being from that which does not have being, that which only appears or seems to be from that which truly is. Reason in this context is the method or modality ofthinking by which such difference or distinction between the true and the false becomes articulated. Education may then be said to be the process by which all of this occurs, by which one learns to separate appearances from reality, the true from the false, the reasonable from the unreasonable, and thereby the process by which one avoids slavery. For at bottom the enemy for Plato remains slavery and the goal remains freedom from its ravages. Plato, for one, defines his program in specific opposition to Greek tragedy, which he takes among the species ofmimesis or of mimetic poesis that he cites to be the worst threat to his program of absolute difference. The tragic poets leave us without an antidote, he tells us, to its irresistible seductions. Even the best of us—by which he would certainly include Socrates, who has been educating these young men about the processes of education—go to the theater, follow the theatrical performance with enthusiasm, beat their breasts along with the players, and finally praise as most worthy those playwrights who most enable this enthusiasm to take place. The distinction between the true and the mimetic, between the true and the imitational or representational, between that which has being and that which only shadows being, is always on the verge of collapsing in this context. And as a consequence the only safe state, Plato tells us, is the one that excludes theatrical performance from its premises. There is no place in the present context to develop any further the complicated relationship Plato has with his predecessors, and I have hinted at this relationship elsewhere (see Goodhart 261). Suffice it to say that Plato remains in this regard the master in Western circles ofall... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Go's Command by John HareJoshua T. MauldinGod's Command John Hare OXFORD: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015. 368 pp. $110.00Divine command theory has received a significant amount of high-powered philosophical attention in recent years, notably in works by C. Stephen Evans, Robert Adams, and Philip Quinn. John Hare's book God's Command joins this [End Page 197] discussion and advances it by attending not only to the Christian tradition but also (...) to Judaism and Islam, and by engaging with evolutionary psychology. Central to Hare's account of divine command theory is the claim that human nature is a "mixture," characterized by the dual affections for advantage and for justice. Against theories that assume a single-source account of motivation (e.g., eudaimonism), Hare contends that human beings experience the pull of competing motivations, toward morality and self-interest. Any adequate moral theory will account for both motivations and indicate how they can be reconciled. Hare contends that his version of divine command theory is up to this task.It is on this point that Hare most clearly adheres to his claim at the beginning and the end of God's Command that the book "defends the thesis that what makes something morally obligatory is that God commands it, and what makes something morally wrong is that God commands us not to do it" (1). Elsewhere in the book, this kind of philosophical defense recedes. After an initial chapter describing divine command theory in general, and two chapters on eudaimonism and naturalistic deductivism, Hare provides three chapters illustrating how divine command theory is worked out by representative thinkers in the traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, followed by a chapter on how divine command theory can accommodate the findings of evolutionary psychology. The book ends with a summary, showing how the various pieces of the book, which at times read like a series of independent essays, constitute a single picture. In these latter chapters, Hare seems to leave behind the philosophical defense of divine command theory, turning instead toward a discussion of what kind of divine command theory theists should adopt, given their predetermined commitment to theism and divine command theory in general.In one sense, this shift can be understood in terms of audience. Initially, Hare addresses anyone interested in ethics. By the second half of the book, Hare has shifted to convincing theistic ethicists that the best way to hold together their various commitments is to adopt a divine command theory, as opposed to other options such as Eudaimonism. This shift arises as an attempt to fend off a potential criticism of divine command theory—the possibility that people will do terrible things in the name of God's command. Hare suggests that Kant provides one solution to this problem, which is that if we think God is commanding us to do something that is at odds with practical reason, we ought to doubt that God is really commanding us to do this thing. Hare is sympathetic to Kant here, but he also seems to think that Kant's solution would undermine his own project, insofar as it makes God's command appear superfluous. Hare's alternative approach involves acknowledging that religious traditions possess safeguards to protect against the possibility that appeal to a divine command is used to justify horrendous evils. For Hare, the Abrahamic traditions provide historical evidence that the benefits of divine command ethics can be enjoyed without accepting the apparently bad aspects. [End Page 198]Hare himself notes that there is a kind of circularity here. He has made the point as a kind of hypothetical: If you already believe in God as the divine commander, and adhere to one of the Abrahamic traditions, you will possess resources to overcome this problem. As he admits at the end of chapter 5, he has not addressed the question of why someone who does not already believe in God as the source of morality ought to begin to do so. Nevertheless, the question of whether thinkers within religious traditions have provided compelling answers to the epistemological problems at the center of divine command theory will be of interest to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Translation of Levinas’s Review of Lev Shestov’s Kierkegaard and the Existential PhilosophyJames McLachlan (bio)In 1937, Emmanuel Levinas published a review of Lev Shestov’s Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy.1 In one of the first studies in English on Levinas, Edith Wyschogrod claims: “What Levinas writes of Shestov’s analysis of Kierkegaard might well be taken as a program for his own future work.”2 The review of Shestov’s Kierkegaard book shows Levinas (...) sympathy with Shestov’s rebellion against rationalism and totalism, his complaint that the individual and all her concerns, desires, and suffering were crushed by the world and ignored by philosophy. But his review of Shestov’s book also shows Levinas’s concern the rebellion could end in “the vanity of personal protest” and substitute subjective imprisonment for the imprisonment of history.3 Such irrationalism could lead to its own forms of violence, which in 1937 were becoming apparent.Like Levinas, Shestov helped introduce Husserl in France, although in Shestov’s case as an adversary to Husserl with whom he developed a friendship.4 The exchange between Shestov and Levinas’s Strasbourg teacher Jean Hering helped publicize Husserl in France.5 As an [End Page 237] exile in Europe, Shestov published his most powerful works Potestas Clavium, In Job’s Balances, Athens and Jerusalem, and Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy. Shestov sought, through a continued hammering, to escape the trap of Being toward radical freedom.6 The form of Shestov’s escape attempt can be situated between Levinas and Kierkegaard. He shares with Levinas the desire to escape ontology but, like Kierkegaard, Shestov’s version of the escape is into a radically individual relation with God through a violent repudiation of the universal; thus, both Levinas’s disagreement with and attraction to Shestov in his 1937 review of Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy prefigure his rejection of Kierkegaard.One must be wary of reading Shestov as a kind of introduction to any thinker he engages, and thus the inclusion for many years of Shestov’s book on short bibliographies on Kierkegaard was extremely misleading. The book was quite influential when it appeared in 1936 around the same time as Jean Wahl’s Études Kierkegaardiennes. Shestov’s work is filled with hyperbole, exaggeration, and polemic. All of his writings are more literary essays than works of scholarship. And it is this mesmerizing writing that Russian literary critic D. S. Mirsky called “the tidiest, the most elegant, the most concentrated... in short, the most classical prose in the whole of modern Russian Literature.”7 A more perceptive reader than many Kierkegaardians who have read Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, Levinas wrote in 1937 that “the philosophical project of M. Shestov often takes on the allure of brilliant literary essay. It is a ‘poem’ rather than a ‘work.’ The author is more present therein than his subject.”8Here Levinas notes several important points about Shestov’s Kierkegaard book. Perhaps the most important is that it is not primarily about Kierkegaard that “the author is more present therein than his subject.” Levinas sees Shestov had indeed seized on one of the central aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought but “what affects us more deeply still, and this is not its smallest attraction, the ideas of M. Shestov.”9 This is true of all of Shestov’s work. It is a “vast symposium” around the problems that agitated Shestov. [End Page 238]________Emmanuel Levinas, review of Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy (Vox clamantis in deserto), by Leon Chestov, trans. T. Rageot and B. de Schloezer, Revue des Études Juives 101, nos. 1–2 (1937): 139–41.The thought of Søren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher, dead in 1855, has known for some time a rare good fortune. Jaspers and Heidegger in German, Jean Wahl and Gabriel Marcel in France, are some of the names that permit us to measure the quality of the influence, which, in a very solid manner, he has also exercised on the only modern philosopher of Judaism worthy of the name, Franz Rosenzweig. This good fortune is not just a mode. The moral crisis opened by the War of 1914 has given men a... (shrink)

_Ian Buruma explores the life and death of Baruch Spinoza, the Enlightenment thinker whose belief in freedom of thought and speech resonates in our own time_ Baruch (Benedictus) Spinoza (1632–1677) was a radical free thinker who led a life guided by strong moral principles despite his disbelief in an all-seeing God. Seen by many—Christians as well as Jews—as Satan’s disciple during his lifetime, Spinoza has been regarded as a secular saint since his death. Many contradictory beliefs have been attached to (...) his name: rationalism or metaphysics, atheism or pantheism, liberalism or despotism, Jewishness or anti-Semitism. However, there is no question that he viewed freedom of thought and speech as essential to an open and free society. In this insightful account, the award-winning author Ian Buruma stresses the importance of the time and place that shaped Spinoza, beginning with the Sephardim of Amsterdam and followed by the politics of the Dutch Republic. Though Spinoza rejected the basic assumptions of his family’s faith, and was consequently expelled from his Sephardic community, Buruma argues that Spinoza did indeed lead a Jewish life: a _modern_ Jewish life. To Heine, Hess, Marx, Freud, and no doubt many others today, Spinoza exemplified how to be Jewish without believing in Judaism. His defense of universal freedom is as important for our own time as it was in his. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Works cited.

This chapter contains sections titled: Setting the Task Varieties of Religious Expressions If There Were No God … Religion, Ethics, and Violence: An Assessment Responding to Religion, Ethics, and Violence: Some Proposals Conclusions.