Two German philosophers working during the Weimar Republic in Germany, between the two World Wars, produced seminal texts that continue to resonate almost a hundred years later. Franz Rosenzweig—a Jewish philosopher, and Martin Heidegger—a philosopher who at one time was studying to become a Catholic priest, each in their own, particular way include in their writings powerful philosophies of art that, if approached phenomenologically and ethically, provide keys to understanding their radically divergent trajectories, both biographically and for their philosophical heritage. (...) Simon provides a close reading of some of their essential texts—The Star of Redemption for Rosenzweig and Being and Time and The Origin of the Work of Art for Heidegger—in order to draw attention to how their philosophies of art can be understood to provide significant ethical directives. (shrink)

This essay explores my own situation of teaching philosophy in a more or less traditional undergraduate setting but in a way that is especially relevant to the theme of this Congress, namely, the theme of "philosophy educating humanity." In my case, I teach philosophy but from a perspective that is non-traditional and which undercuts the standard questions originating from and orienting around a "philosophia perennia." Specifically, I teach philosophy of religion from the perspective of Jewish philosophy, and even more specifically, (...) from the perspective of the French Jewish philosophy of Emmanuelle Levinas. Moreover, I teach philosophy in an educational environment that is representative of the greater global community because I teach at the University of Texas at El Paso, situated on the border that separates the United States and Latin America. Finally, my teaching situation is one that is further marginalized because of the precarious nature of my academic position, namely, trained outside the traditional borders of philosophical faculty and working at first as a part-timer and only recently as a full-time, non-tenure track teacher of philosophy and humanities. Hence, I offer my experience of doing work of successfully teaching philosophy "on the borders" in the hope that others gathered here will be challenged to think differently about their own way of educating others. (shrink)

The article introduces a critical distinction into an analysis of the phenomenon of human motivation out of the philosophies of Spinoza and Rosenzweig through an alternative reading of their respective conceptions of motivation. The essay attempts to show how the ethical problem of motivation entails the concept of transgression in these two great thinkers.

The shared trajectory and thought between the phenomenological hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger and midrashic analysis of Franz Rosenzweig is established with respect to the task of taking up existing “classical” texts such as “The Song of Songs” and “The Ister” as well with respect to the embodied conditions of understanding through language with a view to delineating the motivating factors and the structural guidelines that determine our interpretive activities; specifically, intentional structures that distinguish communicative acts from one another that either (...) brings them into conflict or into fruitful and harmonious communities. (shrink)

This youtube video presents the talk I gave at the Center for Ethics, Law and Applied Philosophy in Belgrade, Serbia at the conference "Rosenzweig für Anfänger / Rosenzweig for Beginners" and that took place June 4-5, 2012 The first paragraph of my talk: "Rosenzweig begins Book One of Part Two in a familiar yet strange way. It is familiar in how he immediately takes up an already established narrative from the Bible through simply repeating the statement that “God spoke.” It (...) is strange, however, because the first thing he draws our attention to in the phrase “God spoke” is how it expresses a temporal condition. It occurs in the form of the grammatical past tense whose content refers us to a previously silent and invisible—because interior—act of the will. That act is one of the strangest and most mysterious of all acts, namely, the act of creation. To create something new—for example, something literally out of nothing—entails putting into motion a powerful expression of spontaneous willfulness. As Rosenzweig notes, this spontaneous expression is what constitutes something totally new, that is, that something could be created out of nothing is understandable as the apparently miraculous prophecy of a process that has become a visible actuality. And that process is the process of our experiencing anything at all. Moreover, the very fact of communicating an understanding of our experiencing anything at all and having that be understood by another is a novelty of human community only able to be enacted through speech because how we talk to each other refers us to our experience of things in the world. To better understand this point, Rosenzweig distinguishes between a creator, in this case, the creator from the biblical story called god, and whatever it is that a creator creates. In order to do that, however, Rosenzweig says that we have to better understand what speaking itself is all about." My talk was one in a series of talks that will be published as a chapter in the forthcoming book, Rosenzweig for Beginners. (shrink)

with John Roth and Jennifer Geddes; nominated for the National Jewish Book Award for non-fiction for 2009.

As far as I can tell, the concept of “desert” in Levinas’s thought seems to retain itsfamiliar associations, namely, as an environment that can be empirically characterizedas inhospitable, barren, and destitute of the kinds of material resources necessary forthe growth of the autonomous and autochthonous subjective self. It also seems plausiblethat a relevant extension of desert conditions to human community in Levinas’stopography would be the “cities” of concentration camps of the Holocaust. In otherwords, there is a correlative interior type of (...) desert that, with Levinas, can be intuitedas what I am calling a desert of the ethical. In what follows I would like to refer toboth of these conditions—the ontological and the ethical deserts—as a way to betterunderstand why humans in general move from such desert regions to areas that promisewhat seems like greater fecundity and the possibilities of growth and expansion offamily and tribe. I would like to modify each of these depictions in consonance withwhat I take to be a Levinasian ethical horizon for my reflections. (shrink)

In terms of phenomenology, I often wonder about the relevance of what I do as a philosopher for the life of those with whom I come into contact. This ‘coming into contact’ happens for me on several levels: as one human among many, as a husband and father and son and brother, as a teacher, as a neighbor, and as country or city dweller. I remember with fondness those times in the late sultry summer months when, as a youth, I (...) would drive with my father to this or that local farm-stand on some remote back road in the hills of Hunterdon County, New Jersey—the Garden State—in order to seek out the freshest sweet corn that was being harvested by our farming friends. In the 1960s, there was not even the slightest inkling that any of those ears of corn might at all be the product of genetic engineering, although I was vaguely aware that some cross-fertilization may have occurred to produce such sweetness. How could the earth, entirely on its own and without the assistance of human artifice, generate such delicacies? I recently made a trip to Queretaro, Mexico and am happy to report that I tasted once again the experience of my youth, reminiscent of that sweet white corn laden with goodness and available for sale on the farm stands of New Jersey. I was able to relive that taste not because of the miracle of gm-engineered corn in itself, but because of the resistance of the Mexican people to the introduction of genetically modified food products into their daily buying habits. They have been especially resistant to buying corn. On the one hand, my paper takes the form of a phenomenological analysis of genetic modification of food products, while on the other hand, I consider the phenomenological significance of the transfer of biotechnology for its deeply rooted cross-border ethical, political, and cultural significance. As a way to focus my remarks, I limit my analysis to the phenomenon of GM corn. (shrink)

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 8.5px Times} My thesis is that current cities and the way that cities are beingdeveloped is unsustainable and poses global problems for the long-termflourishing of the world’s inter-related and interdependent economies, formatters of justice and happiness in socio-cultural relations between peoples,and for the health of our natural environments. I argue that ‘urbandesertification’ happens in the complex relationship between cities (both urbanand suburban) and rural environments that support them as both a natural andethical phenomenon (...) that I study using a form of analysis calledphenomenological ethics. First, I briefly present sketches of phenomenologyand sustainability in order to introduce the method of phenomenological ethicsto develop a more adequate understanding of urban sustainability. Then, I makea connection between desertification and urbanisation. Finally, I focus on thecity of El Paso, Texas in order to provide an empirical and relevant case studyof the existing problems of desertification and sustainability. (shrink)

This article is a rough draft of an article that I contributed to an edited volume of articles dealing with progressive education theory. I reflect on articles that Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin wrote that deal with educational reform and innovation, both political in nature.

My goal, in interpreting Arendt’s analyses of the polis – both modern and ancient – is to conceptualize the role that ‘healthy’ public spaces can play in modern cities. What distinguishes my interpretation of her work is how I integrate her seminal conception of a philosophy of natality in the constellation of elemental concepts: labor, work, and action, as a way to understand the rise and fall of Detroit and to set the possible horizon for its reincarnation as a ‘sustainable’ (...) and flourishing city beautiful. For me, it is precisely this conceptualization, as a philosophy of natality, that enables us to better identify the metaphysical and political foundations of her ideas about the polis and its possible pragmatic application for recreating public spaces in other modern, cosmopolitan cities. I end up considering what it means to become “native to a place” in the sense that was adopted in the rebirth of the River Rouge Complex and just what that has to do with the emergence of the barrio of Mexicantown in Detroit as a quintessential sign of successful city living and a sign of hope for a brighter, more beautiful future. (shrink)

Thought and Social Engagement in the Mexican-American Philosophy of John H. Haddox : A Collection of Critical Appreciations.