Jewish Philosophy

In this article, I outline a logic of design of a system as a specific kind of conceptual logic of the design of the model of a system, that is, the blueprint that provides information about the system to be created. In section two, I introduce the method of levels of abstraction as a modelling tool borrowed from computer science. In section three, I use this method to clarify two main conceptual logics of information (i.e., modelling systems) inherited from modernity: Kant's transcen-dental logic of conditions of possibility of a system, and Hegel's dialectical logic of conditions of in/stability of a system. Both conceptual logics of information analyse structural properties of given systems. Strictly speaking, neither is a conceptual logic of information about (or modelling) the conditions of feasibility of a system, that is, neither is a logic of information as a logic of design. So, in section four, I outline this third conceptual logic of information and then interpret the conceptual logic of design as a logic of requirements, by introducing the relation of " suffici-entisation ". In the conclusion, I argue that the logic of requirements is exactly what we need in order to make sense of, and buttress, a constructionist (poietic) approach to knowledge.

L’article a pour sujet la personnalité extraordinaire du kabbaliste le Rabbin Levi Isaac Krakovsky (1891–1966), un des étudiants oubliés du Rabbin Yehuda Leib Ashlag (1885–1955). Krakovsky diffusait l’enseignement de son maître en Amérique en anglais, écrivait des douzaines de livres et essayait d’établir des yeshivot de Kabbalistes. Contrairement à son maître, il présentait un enseignement exotérique et une vision de diffusion de la Kabbale dans le monde entier. Son influence était minime, mais un de ses élèves était Shraga Philip Berg qui continuait son chemin et le complétait de plusieurs points de vue. L’article se base sur de riches matières archivales, parmi lesquelles de longues essays de l’auteur en manuscrit qui sont décrits ici pour la premiere fois. D’une telle façon, nous décrivons le dévelopment de la Kabbale en Amérique du début du vingtième siècle jusqu’ aujourd’hui.

A nearly completed college textbook at a Graduate/PhD level the main thrust of this book is how pagan early religions, Judaism and later Christianity collided in the 4th century to form what we know as the Bible. Unlike most books on the history of religions "Unmasking...." doesn't have just one argument, rather 100's. My reasons is religion is thousands of years old and there is no one argument for the myriad of personalities that wrote out these scriptures! Also, this book is done with a narrating 'question/answer' layout and is more aimed at the layperson rather than the scholar--although it still cites/annotates as much as possible.
Within Hebrew scriptures the book uses a 'minimalist' approach to Jewish history rather than its superficial scriptural. With the NT, the book uses a Post-Modern viewpoint which I'm sure will cause more howls from evangelicals.
  The book uses quotes from 100's of historians, scholars and educators throughout the world--most of which head how and why scripture came into our world 3,000 years ago and will fulfill a better understanding of past religions.

Against the backdrop of the problem of the meaning of life as constructed in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, this article asks the question of what the supposed meaning(s) of the biblical character of Moses' life were assumed to be. By comparing a variety of contemporary philosophical perspectives on life's meaning with what appears to be related nascent metaphysical presuppositions in the world(s) of the biblical text, the pros and cons of reading with an anachronistic philosophical-theological metalanguage are clearly demonstrated. It is concluded that what Moses' life might have meant cannot be reduced either to a singular purpose or a unified teleology. Given the complex construction of his character's personal identity over time, the point of it all remains fragmented, plural and elusive.

“And They Shall Be One Flesh”: On the Language of Mystical Union in Judaism, Adam Afterman offers an extensive study of mystical union and embodiment in Judaism. Afterman argues that Philo was the first to articulate the notion of unio mystica in Judaism and is the source of the henōsis mysticism in the later Neoplatonic tradition. The study provides a detailed analysis of the Jewish medieval trends that developed different forms of mystical union and mystical embodiment through the divine name and spirit. The book argues that the development of unitive mysticism in Judaism is the fruit of the creative synthesis of rabbinic Judaism and Hellenistic and Arab philosophy, and a natural outcome of the theological articulation of the idea of monotheism itself.

From 1933 through 1945, the Hebrew Bible was under attack in Nazi Germany. Indeed, the entire notion that Christianity had any connection to Judaism was systematically denied. Even within the Church, the long-standing tradition of “Old Testament“ studies was marginalized. This paper studies the heroic struggles of Gerhard von Rad. It tells the story of how von Rad, long before he became a famous Protestant theologian, fought in near isolation to defend the Old Testament. Much of the gripping story has not been widely known, and has only recently become available.

Keywords: Old Testament Theology, Jewish Studies, University of Jena, Gerhard von Rad, Walter Grundmann, Susannah Heschel, Deuteronomy, Deuteronomium, German-Jewish, history, Holocaust, modern German history, Karl Astel, Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben, Deuteronomy as sermon; Theologische Fakultät der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena; Theological Faculty of the University of Jena

There are many ways of understanding the nature of philosophical questions. One may consider their morphology, semantics, relevance, or scope. This article introduces a different approach, based on the kind of informational resources required to answer them. The result is a definition of philosophical questions as questions whose answers are in principle open to informed, rational, and honest disagreement, ultimate but not absolute, closed under further questioning, possibly constrained by empirical and logico-mathematical resources, but requiring noetic resources to be answered. The article concludes with a discussion of some of the consequences of this definition for a conception of philosophy as the study (or “science”) of open questions, which uses conceptual design to analyse and answer them.

A survey of philosophy in the first half of the 6th/12th century that deals with al-Ghazali, al-Lawkari (d. after 1109), and Abu l-Barakat al-Baghdadi (d. c. 1165). I particularly focus on the relationship between Abu l-Barakat and al-Ghazali and present here at first the argument that Abu l-Barakat's philosophy is a reaction to al-Ghazali's critcism of Ibn Sina. In this paper I argue that Abu l-Barakat's method of "i'tibar" ("careful consideration") is developed as a conscious alternative to the demontrative method, whose application in metaphysics al-Ghazali rejects.

The spectrum of practices termed “Female Genital Mutilation” (or FGM) by the World Health Organization is sometimes held up as a counterexample to moral relativism. Those who advance this line of thought suggest the practices are so harmful in terms of their physical and emotional consequences, as well as so problematic in terms of their sexist or oppressive implications, that they provide sufficient, rational grounds for the assertion of a universal moral claim—namely, that all forms of FGM are wrong, regardless of the cultural context. However, others point to cultural bias and moral double standards on the part of those who espouse this argument, and have begun to question the received interpretation of the relevant empirical data concerning FGM as well. In this article I assess the merits of these competing perspectives. I argue that each of them involves valid moral concerns that should be taken seriously in order to move the discussion forward. In doing so, I draw on the biomedical “enhancement” literature in order to develop a novel ethical framework for evaluating FGM (and related interventions—such as female genital “cosmetic” surgery and non-therapeutic male circumcision) that takes into account the genuine harms that are at stake in these procedures, but which does not suffer from being based on cultural or moral double standards.

The Haskalah, or “Jewish Enlightenment,” is often considered to be a secularizing trend within modern European Judaism. Yet as recent studies have begun to show, this characterization ignores the Romantic and religious attitudes of many Haskalah authors (maskilim). This article reassesses the Haskalah’s relationship to esotericism and Kabbalah by analyzing the life and work of Elyakim Getzel Hamilzahgi (1780–1854), a Galician maskil with a deep commitment to Kabbalistic study. Hamilzahgi’s pioneering textual criticism of Kabbalistic texts, particularly the Zohar, countered the attitudes of Western European scholars and Eastern European Hasidim alike. His scholarship aimed to purify Kabbalah from corruption and to render it a source for a renewal of Jewish religious culture.

In the following article we will examine at length some of the dynamics by which R. Yosef Hayyim of Baghdad—the renowned Ben Ish Hai (1834–1909) - integrated Kabbalah into daily life, and the complex way that he combined the teachings of the Rashash with simplified, esoteric practices meant for the general public. Needless to say, the relationship between the Kabbalists of Jerusalem and R. Yosef Hayyim illuminates a fascinating chapter in the history of Kabbalah in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century.

http://mj.oxfordjournals.org/content/33/2/148.short?rss=1

This article demonstrates the overlooked contribution of the ancient Near East to the development of constitutional law. The legal corpus of Deuteronomy provides a utopian model for the organization of the state, one that enshrines separation of powers and their systematic subordination to a public legal text—the “Torah”—that delineates their jurisdiction while also ensuring their autonomy. This legislation establishes an independent judiciary while bringing even the monarch under the full authority of the law. Deuteronomy’s implicit model for a political constitution is unprecedented in legal history. Two of its cornerstones are fundamental to the modern idea of constitutional government: (1) the clear division of political powers into separate spheres of authority; and (2) the subordination of each branch to the authority of the law. This legislation was so utopian in its own time that it seems never to have been implemented; instead, idealism rapidly yielded to political pragmatism. Nonetheless, Deuteronomy’s draft constitution provides an important corrective to standard accounts of constitutional legal history.

Keywords:
Constitutional theory; rule of law; separation of powers; Deut 16:18-18:22; Laws of public officials; Law of the king; independence of the judiciary; Deut 17:14-20; Ämtergesetze; Verfassungstheorie; Torah monarchy; Sophocles Antigone law; Herodotus Demaratus; Greek kingship; Mishnah King; mishnah Aboth 1:1; American constitution; Josephus πολιτεία [politeia]; origin of judicial system; Hammurabi; founding myth; independent judiciary.

In the first part of this paper we will consider the likely extent of Spinoza’s exposure to Kabbalistic literature as he was growing up in Amsterdam. In the second part we will closely study three texts in which Spinoza seems to engage with Kabbalistic doctrines. In the third and final part we will study the role of the two crucial (and closely related) doctrines of emanation and pantheism (or panentheism), in Spinoza’s system and in the Kabbalistic literature.

Within a literary ontology, YHWH in the Hebrew Bible is technically also a fictional entity or object. In Hebrew Bible scholarship, a variety of philosophical issues surrounding fiction have received sustained and in-depth attention. However, the mainstream research on these matters tends to focus on the philosophical foundations of or backgrounds to a particular literary theory, rather than on metaphysical puzzles as encountered in the philosophy of fiction proper. To fill this gap, the present article seeks to provide a meta-theoretical overview of the main contemporary philosophical perspectives on the metaphysics of fictional objects. Three views (and their sub-currents) are discussed, namely possibilism, (neo-)Meinongianism and (literary) creationism. Each view’s theory is introduced and critically appropriated with reference to what is implied to be an answer to the question of what exactly the biblical character YHWH can meaningfully be said to be in the context of the metaphysics of fictional objects. In this way, the present study also goes beyond the traditional concern with the nature of God in Old Testament theology.

One of the more astounding books produced by Bratslav Hasidism is Liqquṭei tefilot (1822–1827), composed by R. Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, which established a whole new genre in Bratslav literature. This article discusses the book's genesis, publication, and primary goals, as well as the controversy it generated. The new Bratslav theology that emerged after the death of Rabbi Naḥman led to disputes, both internal and external, over the role and character of R. Nathan. Examining this particularly obscure chapter in the early history of Bratslav Hasidism sheds light on the movement as it exists today in all its diversity, both ideological and social. Keywords Bratslav Hasidism – Hasidism – Jewish mysticism – Kabbalah

Full Article
http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/1477285x-12341269;jsessionid=1n5j66dblsols.x-brill-live-03

In this master thesis, I investigate how Philo of Alexandria (ca. 15 BCE - 45 CE), as a Jewish philosopher, interpreted the Jewish figure of Wisdom (a personification that Proverbs 8 describes as having been present with God when he created the world) in the Platonic/Pythagorean philosophical context in which Philo operates. To this end, I examined the personification of Wisdom in the Hebrew wisdom literature (Proverbs, Job, Baruch & Ben Sira). Then, I searched through Plato's dialogues for similar ways of conceptualizing the world order and its relation to the divine. In my third chapter, I review the tradition of the early Academy and of neo-Pythagoreanism, which forms the hermeneutical paradigm for Philo's understanding of Plato. Then, I turn to the Greek translations of the Jewish wisdom literature, and to Aristobulus and Wisdom of Solomon, to look for attempts to relate Wisdom to Greek philosophy before Philo. Finally, I discuss a select number of passages in which Philo speaks about wisdom.

This essay examines the ways in which Israeli philosophy has approached the question of war. Because of the influence of the neo-Kantian pacifism on the first generation of Israeli philosophers, it is only in the aftermath of the 1982 Lebanon war that a punctual reflection on issues of military ethics develops (as for instance in Weiler’s and Casher’s thought). The problem of the peculiarity of Israel’s wars, however, has been the focus of other Israel thinkers only in the light of the relationship between State and religion (as in Leibowitz and Margalit) as well as between the civil society and the political institutions (as in Adi Ophir). In conclusion and in spite of its unquestionable originality, Israeli philosophy differs from other Western intellectual traditions only in the fact that it has generally avoided the question of war at the expense of other issues perceived as more urgent.

Medieval and early modern Jewish philosophers developed their thinking in conversation with various bodies of literature. The influence of ancient Greek-primarily Aristotle (and pseudo-Aristotle)-and Arabic sources was fundamental for the very constitution of medieval Jewish philosophical discourse. Toward the late Middle Ages Jewish philosophers also established a critical dialogue with Christian scholastics. Next to these philosophical corpora, Jewish philosophers drew significantly upon Rabbinic sources (Talmud and the numerous Midrashim) and the Hebrew Bible. In order to clarify the unique as well as shared elements in the thought of medieval Jewish philosophers, we will begin this chapter with a brief study of some early Rabbinic sources on the purpose of the world, i.e., why it came to be and why it is sustained in existence. In the second part of this chapter, we will study Maimonides' critique of the veracity and usefulness of the belief in (anthropocentric) teleology, and the critical reception of these views by later philosophers. The third part will address discussions of divine teleology in Kabbalistic literature. Our exposition will concentrate mostly on a specific early-eighteenth-century text that is one of the most lucid and rigorous presentations of Lurianic Kabbalah. The fourth and final section will elucidate Spinoza's critique of teleology, its precise target and scope, and its debt to earlier sources discussed in this chapter.

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.

a short text on the concept of justice by Walter Benjamin. The text was preserved by Gershom Scholem on 8 October 2016, the same method by which most of Benjamin's early writings have reached us. However, this piece somehow remained undetected by the editors of the Gesammelte Schriften. It first appeared in German and English in Metaphysics of the Profane, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 166-169, with permission of the German publishers Suhrkamp Verlag. It is presented here with a typographical error corrected.

This unique scholarly work by Maulana Abdul Haque Vidyarthi, presents the prophecies about the advent of the holy Prophet Muhammad in the various world scriptures. The author proves that the scriptures of all nations foretell the advent of the Holy prophet. He has treated the Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Hebrew and Christian Scriptures separately. The literal translation of the text has been done by scholars of that particular religion. Volume 1 of the new edition deals with prophecies about the Holy Prophet Muhammad in the Bible

Archaeology is indispensable for understanding the genesis and development of halakhah, Jewish ritual law, and the impact of its observance on the functioning of ancient Jewish societies. Using examples from my own work over the past few years, this paper seeks to illustrate the kinds of data archaeology can provide on how ancient halakhah was practiced, information which is simply not to be found in texts. The topics to be surveyed include mikva’ot (ritual baths), chalkstone vessels and tefillin (phylacteries). The unique contribution of archaeology to the study of each of these halakhic phenomena is explored with special focus on what archaeology has to teach us about these rituals which we would not have known from the texts alone. Some of the potential hazards and pitfalls of using archaeology together with texts of a halakhic nature are discussed as well, including the anachronistic use of written sources in interpreting earlier remains and the mistaken privileging of rabbinic halakhah over alternative possibilities. Archaeology and texts tend to provide very different kinds of information, and if brought together prudently, hold the potential to afford a much more comprehensive and accurate understanding of how halakhah was observed in the ancient past.

From the earliest stages of Wissenschaft des Judentums, scholars of Judaism typically read statements about God in the classical sources of Judaism with a mediaeval philosophical lens. By doing so, they sought to demonstrate the essential unity and continuity between rabbinic Judaism, later mediaeval Jewish philosophy and modern Judaism. In the late 1980s, the Maimonidean hold on rabbinic scholarship began to crack when the ‘revisionist school’ sought to drive a wedge between rabbinic Judaism, on the one hand, and Maimonidean Judaism, on the other hand, by highlighting the deep continuities and links between rabbinic Judaism and mediaeval Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah). The revisionist scholars regarded rabbinic Judaism as a pre-cursor to mediaeval Kabbalah rather than mediaeval Jewish philosophy. This article provides the history of scholarship on these two methods of reading rabbinic texts and then proposes that scholars adopt a third method. That is, building on the work of recent scholarship, we should confront theological rabbinic texts on their own terms, without the guiding hand of either mediaeval Jewish framework.

The mediaeval is present to both sides in the current conflicts between the Anglo-American Protestant powers, who depict themselves as the defenders of our Western Christian Civilization, on the one hand, and the Islamic Middle East, on the other. It belongs to their war of words; both sides hurl the mediaeval as an abuse. On the one side, as in the Middle Ages, Islam thinks itself  attacked by a new group of invasive Christian Crusaders, once again desecrating their holy places, occupying their homelands, and massacring them. On the other side, modern Westerners label their Muslim opposition as “mediaeval,” a name evoking the dark and backward, a confusion of religion and the secular bringing cruelty and ignorance. Significantly, however, the “Middle Ages” or “Dark Ages” is a period only within European history. Thus Westerners accusing their adversaries of being mediaeval are attacking something in their own formative history, something about themselves and their past they fear and hate. When we study and evaluate the mediaeval, we are engaged simultaneously in a confrontation with what we represent as an external enemy and with ourselves.
The mediaeval as an historical period and cultural characteristic was invented in the European Renaissance—which we treat in the next Section of the Foundation Year Programme. It depicted the immediately preceding centuries as a barren period characterized by darkness and ignorance, in comparison with the earlier glories of Greece and Rome. The proud spirits of the Renaissance supposed themselves to have recaptured and even surpassed the Ancient birth of humanism. The thousand years from 500 C.E. to 1500 C.E. between the two moments of humane light and glory thus became the dark middle period.  The view of European history as having a negatively characterised middle was reinforced by the Protestant Reformers. They set the Bible against Christian tradition and sought to recover the purity and simplicity of primitive Christianity behind all the supposed accretions of a thousand years of ecclesiastical mediation. “Gothic” became a term of opprobrium, equivalent to “barbaric.”
No such idea of these centuries occurs within Islam. In the millennium between the seventh and the seventeenth centuries, Islam spread over and united a world far more vast and more culturally inclusive than Rome ever ruled. Islamic culture assimilated the philosophical, theological, scientific, and technological accomplishments of the Hellenes and Romans, added to them in very significant ways, developed its own proper art, architecture, literature, religious and political forms, and educated a relatively backward and barbaric Europe.
In this Section, we shall first look at the conclusion of late Ancient spiritual culture through the Neoplatonisms of Plotinus (died 270) and Iamblichus (250-330), and their Christian continuations in the Latin Augustine (354-430), on the one side, and the Greek Byzantine Dionysius (6th century), on the other. Then, we shall consider how Islam picked up and developed the Hellenic and Roman heritage, pagan and Christian, how it transmitted these to Latin Europe, and how the culture of the high Middle Ages was constructed in relation to what the Islamic world conveyed.
Despite its pejorative origins, the notion of a “middle” age can serve us in characterising this period.  In general, mediaevals are related to the ancients through the mediating “middle” of the religions and philosophical schools of Late Antiquity.  The character of philosophy in the Middle Ages is indicative.

Contemporary science seems to be caught in a strange predicament. On the one hand, it holds a firm and reasonable commitment to a healthy naturalistic methodology, according to which explanations of natural phenomena should never overstep the limits of the natural itself. On the other hand, contemporary science is also inextricably and now inevitably dependent on ever more complex technologies, especially Information and Communication Technologies, which it exploits as well as fosters. Yet such technologies are increasingly " artificialising " or " denaturalis-ing " the world, human experiences and interactions, as well as what qualifies as real. So the search for the ultimate explanation of the natural seems to rely upon, and promote, the development of the artificial, seen here as an instantiation of the non-natural. In this article, I would like to try and find a way out of this apparently strange predicament. I shall argue that the naturalisation of our knowledge of the world is either philosophically trivial (naturalism as anti-supernaturalism and anti-preternaturalism), or mistaken (naturalism as anti-constructionism). First, I shall distinguish between different kinds of naturalism. Second, I shall remind the reader that the kinds of naturalism that are justified today need to be protected and supported pragmatically, but they are no longer very interesting conceptually. We know how to win the argument. We just have to keep winning it. Whereas the kind of naturalism that is still interesting today is now in need of revision in order to remain acceptable. Such a kind of naturalism may be revised on the basis of a realistic philosophy of information, according to which knowing is a constructive activity, through which we do not merely represent the phenomena we investigate passively, but create more or less correct informational models (semantic artefacts) of them, proactively and interactively. I shall conclude that the natural is in itself artefactual (a semantic construction), and that the information revolution is disclosing a tension not between the natural and the non-natural, but a deeper one between a user's and a producer's interpretation of knowledge. The outcome is a philosophical view of knowledge and science in the information age that may be called constructionist and a revival of philosophy as a classic, foundationalist enterprise.

Keywords Constructionism · Closure · Level of abstraction · Naturalism · Naturalisation · Open question argument · Reasonably reiterable query test