In histories of Orthodox Judaism, one often reads the story of a collision between tradition and modernity. Orthodoxy, according to this logic, is a fortress of the old world, which, upon encounter...

Breaks through the cultural barriers between Western, Indian, and Chinese philosophy and demonstrates that despite considerable differences between these three great philosophical traditions, there are fundamental resemblances in their abstract principles.

Lucid, learned, and incomparably rich in thought and detail, Art Without Borders is a monumental accomplishment, on par with the artistic achievements ...

Scharfstein describes the extraordinary powers that have been attributed to language everywhere, and then looks at ineffability as it has appeared in the thought of the great philosophical cultures: India, China, Japan, and the West. He argues that there is something of our prosaic, everyday difficulty with words in the ineffable reality of the philosophers and theologians, just as there is something unformulable, and finally mysterious in the prosaic, everyday successes and failures of words.

The adventure I am now undertaking is an appraisal of my profession, philosophy, of my fellow professionals, the philosophers, and, finally of myself at least ...

In The Dilemma of Context, Scharfstein contends that the problems encountered with context are insoluble. He explains why this problem lays an intellectual burden on us that, while remaining inescapable,can become so heavy it destroys the understandingit was created to further.

An introduction to comparative philosophy relates European and Oriental philosophies and brings to light such aspects of Eastern philosophy as intellectuality, reasoning, and logical analysis usually associated with Western thought.

After exploring the theory and practice of politics in ancient China, ancient India, and modern Europe, Scharfstein argues that the justification for deception and force is inseparable from political life and assesses the chances for a better political future.

ROOTS OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY Ben-Ami Scharfstein ROOTS OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY NEW YORK MCMXLIII COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS To My Father and Mother ...

What if Immanuel Kant floated down from his transcendental heights, straight through Alice’s rabbit hole, and into the fabulous world of Lewis Carroll? For Ben-Ami Scharfstein this is a wonderfully instructive scenario and the perfect way to begin this wide-ranging collection of decades of startlingly synthesized thought. Combining a deep knowledge of psychology, cultural anthropology, art history, and the history of religions—not to mention philosophy—he demonstrates again and again the unpredictability of writing and thought and how they can teach us (...) about our experiences. Scharfstein begins with essays on the nature of philosophy itself, moving from an autobiographical account of the trials of being a comparativist to philosophy’s function in the outside world to the fear of death in Kant and Hume. From there he explores an impressive array of art: from China and Japan to India and the West; from an essay on sadistic and masochistic body art to one on the epistemology of the deaf and the blind. He then returns to philosophy, writing on Machiavelli and political ruthlessness, then on the ineffable, and closes with a review of Walter Kaufmann’s multivolume look at the essence of humanity, _Discovering the Mind_. Altogether, these essays are a testament to adventurous thought, the kind that leaps to the furthest reaches of the possible. (shrink)

Sometimes our thought is transparently clear. It is as if we were looking through a window whose clarity was an invitation for the world to come in. The pleasure we take in thinking transparent thoughts is like that we take in the unimpeded use of any ability; but such transparency is unique in that it suggests easy communication with oneself and others, the ability to nullify problems by seeing through them, and a clean, physically effortless mastery of life.

Western philosophers still tend to think that philosophy, in a sense that they can take with professional interest, does not exist in non-Western traditions. To persuade them otherwise would require them to make an effort that they prefer to evade. I attempt to begin to persuade them by closely paraphrasing a few arguments by the early Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu and a few by the Indian skeptic and mystic Shriharsha. One of Chuang Tzu's arguments has some resemblance to Plato's Third-Man (...) argument, another with the impossibility of distinguishing between waking reality and dream, and a third with the impossibility of objective victories in debates. The skeptic Shriharsha, in a way that can be taken to parallel Wittgenstein's attack on conventional philosophy, shows that philosophical definitions cannot be rigorous enough to fulfill the task that philosophers set for them. The rest of this paper is devoted to the problem of commensurability. I contend that philosophies are either commensurable or incommensurable depending on the light in which one prefers to see them. Each way of seeing them involves a loss of a possibility that may be considered precious, but the Westerner who continues to insist on the full incommensurability of non-Western philosophies with his or her own is losing a great deal that might be intellectually helpful. (shrink)

_Interpretation in Religion_ is the work of a group of contemporary American, European, and Israeli scholars and philosophers, who analyze the crucial course of interpretation in religion — religion in general, and, in particular, Hinduism, ancient Egyptian religion, Judaism, christianity, and Islam.