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Aryeh Motzin’s extraordinary essays on the encounter between Jewish tradition and philosophy are collected in this volume. Motzkin examines how medieval Jewish thinkers understood Plato and Aristotle, and how these medieval thinkers were, in turn, understood by modern Jewish thinkers.
This volume brings together the latest scholarship on Jewish literary products and the ways in which they can be interpreted from three different perspectives. In part 1, contributors consider texts as literature, as cultural products, and as historical documents to demonstrate the many ways that early Jewish, rabbinic, and modern secular Jewish literary works make meaning and can be read meaningfully. Part 2 focuses on exegesis of specific biblical and rabbinic texts as well as medieval Jewish poetry. Part 3 examines medieval and early modern Jewish books as material objects and explores the history, functions, and reception of these material objects. Contributors include Javier del Barco, ...
Naive Readings is a collection of nine of Ralph Lerner s essays on an astonishing range of notoriously difficult and complex authors and texts including Benjamin Franklin s secular and his liturgical writings, Jefferson s Summary View, and Abraham Lincoln s various writings on statesmanship before he took office; Bacon s Essayes, Gibbon s writings on Jews, and Tocqueville on Edmund Burke; and finally Judah Halevi s Kuzari, and Maimonides s Guide of the Perplexed. Lerner presents his essays as experiments that challenge our current habits of reading which, especially in the case of such difficult texts, usually involve a hasty dismissal of whatever is deemed irrelevant and superficial. His ai...
Spinoza is commonly perceived as the great metaphysician of coherence. The Euclidean manner in which he presented his philosophy in the Ethics has led readers to assume they are facing a strict and consistent philosophical system that necessarily follows from itself. As opposed to the prevailing understanding of Spinoza and his work, The Role of Contradictions in Spinoza's Philosophy explores an array of profound and pervasive contradictions in Spinoza’s system and argues they are deliberate and constitutive of his philosophical thinking and the notion of God at its heart. Relying on a meticulous and careful reading of the Theological-Political Treatise and the Ethics, this book reconstructs Spinoza's philosophy of contradictions as a key to the ascending three degrees of knowledge leading to the Amor intellectualis Dei. Offering an exciting and clearly-argued interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy, this book will interest students and scholars of modern philosophy and philosophy of religion, as well as Jewish studies. Yuval Jobani is Assistant Professor at the Department of Hebrew Culture Studies and the School of Education at Tel-Aviv University.
This book reveals how Moses ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi, Moses Maimonides, and Shem Tov ibn Falaquera understood metaphor and imagination, and their role in the way human beings describe God. It demonstrates how these medieval Jewish thinkers engaged with Arabic-Aristotelian psychology, specifically with regard to imagination and its role in cognition. Dianna Lynn Roberts-Zauderer reconstructs the process by which metaphoric language is taken up by the imagination and the role of imagination in rational thought. If imagination is a necessary component of thinking, how is Maimonides’ idea of pure intellectual thought possible? An examination of select passages in the Guide, in both Judeo-Arabic and translation, shows how Maimonides’ attitude towards imagination develops, and how translations contribute to a bifurcation of reason and imagination that does not acknowledge the nuances of the original text. Finally, the author shows how Falaquera’s poetics forges a new direction for thinking about imagination.
A Chomprehensive anthology of classic writings on Jewish philosophy from the Bible to postmodernism.
It is a work of sound scholarship dealing with an interesting historical figure and his unique cultural world. The author focuses correctly on the transition from Italian to Ottoman Jewish culture in the life of David Messer Leon and reveals much about the continuities and discontinuities between both societies. He nicely fuses social and intellectual history, and uses a life to illuminate a number of interesting and important cultural trends among early modern Jews, particularly the integration of kabbalah and philosophy, Humanism and Thomism. The presentation of the symbiotic nature of Jewish culture with contemporary intellectual trends and the appropriation of Christian theological strategies by a Jewish thinker to explain Judaism make this study a fascinating one.
This volume assembles multidisciplinary research on the Judaeo-Islamic tradition in medieval and modern contexts. The introduction discusses the nature of this tradition and proposes the more fluid and inclusive designation of “Jewish-Muslim Relations.” Contributions highlight diverse aspects of Jewish-Muslim relations in medieval and modern contexts, including the academic study of Jewish history, the Qur’anic notion of the “upright community” referring to the “People of the Book,” Jews in medieval fatwas, use of Arabic and Hebrew script, Jewish prayer in Christian Europe and the Islamic world, the permissibility of Arabic music in modern Jewish thought, Jewish and Muslim feminist exegesis, modern Sephardic and Morisco identity, popular Tunisian song, Jewish-Muslim relations in cinema and A.S. Yehuda’s study of an 11th-century Jewish mystic.
“This well-written, accessible [essay] collection demonstrates a maturation in Jewish studies and medieval philosophy” (Choice). Too often the study of philosophical texts is carried out in ways that do not pay significant attention to how the ideas contained within them are presented, articulated, and developed. This was not always the case. The contributors to this collected work consider Jewish philosophy in the medieval period, when new genres and forms of written expression were flourishing in the wake of renewed interest in ancient philosophy. Many medieval Jewish philosophers were highly accomplished poets, for example, and made conscious efforts to write in a poetic style. This v...