This response to Jason A. Springs’s Healthy Conflict in Contemporary Society praises Springs for his recommendations for improving the discourse found in ethical conflicts in public life. Springs’s main prescription is for culture to stop repressing conflict. But if Springs ought to be praised for desiring to give conflict its due in public life, Healthy Conflict in Contemporary Life ought also to be criticized for not always being clear on whether there are criteria that authorize excluding some people (e.g. white (...) supremacists) from participating in nonviolent cultural conflict. The essay concludes by suggesting a rehabilitation in religious ethics of the category of the enemy. (shrink)

This essay on Cathleen Kaveny's Prophecy Without Contempt challenges her argument from two opposing sides. First, it critiques all jeremiads. It asks how a person uttering prophetic indictments, whether in the form of a classical jeremiad or the more moderate form that Kaveny argues for, can possibly know of what she speaks, given the otherness of God. Second, it calls for more jeremiads. It asks whether a person, whether religious or not, might indeed know enough to offer withering jeremiads, in (...) those cases where she sees the target of her jeremiad making flagrantly incompatible commitments. (shrink)

Abstract The work of Martin Buber oscillates between talk in which transcendence is experienced and talk in which transcendence is merely postulated. In order to show and mend this incoherence in Buber's thought, this essay attends to the rhetoric of verification ( Bewährung ), primarily but not solely in I and Thou (1923), both in order to show how it is a symptom of this incoherence, and also to show a broad pragmatic strain in Buber's thought. Given this pragmatic (...) strain, the essay argues that a weak notion of Buberian verification, in which taking a dialogic stance with reference to others evinces the right to talk of the real possibility of transcendence (a You-world, or God as the “eternal You“), is all that is necessary to combat despair. Strong notions of encounter are unnecessary, and also sink Buber in a morass of theodicy, in which he interprets historical misfortune and destruction as evidence of history's meaning. (shrink)

Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy contests the ancient opposition between Athens and Jerusalem by retrieving the concept of meontology - the doctrine of nonbeing - from the Jewish philosophical and theological tradition. For Emmanuel Levinas, as well as for Franz Rosenzweig, Hermann Cohen and Moses Maimonides, the Greek concept of nonbeing clarifies the meaning of Jewish life. These thinkers of 'Jerusalem' use 'Athens' for Jewish ends, justifying Jewish anticipation of a future messianic era as well as portraying the (...) subjects intellectual and ethical acts as central in accomplishing redemption. This book envisions Jewish thought as an expression of the intimate relationship between Athens and Jerusalem. It also offers new readings of important figures in contemporary Continental philosophy, critiquing previous arguments about the role of lived religion in the thought of Jacques Derrida, the role of Plato in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and the centrality of ethics in the thought of Franz Rosenzweig. (shrink)

The second volume of The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy provides a comprehensive overview of Jewish philosophy from the seventeenth century to the present day. Written by a distinguished group of experts in the field, its essays examine how Jewish thinking was modified in its encounter with modern Europe and America and challenge longstanding assumptions about the nature and purpose of modern Jewish philosophy. The volume also treats modern Jewish philosophy's continuities with premodern texts and thinkers, the relationship between philosophy (...) and theology, the ritual and political life of the people of Israel and the ways in which classic modern philosophical categories help or hinder Jewish self-articulation. These essays offer readers a multi-faceted understanding of the Jewish philosophical enterprise in the modern period. (shrink)

Levinas's Talmudic readings have played an important role in defending the claim that the discipline of modern Jewish philosophy cannot be reduced to a list of assimilationist thinkers. This article argues that this claim is defendable, but only if the premise of the claim ceases to be the content of Levinas's Talmudic readings: "The Temptation of Temptation" wrongly takes its sugya as representative of Judaism as a whole, the differing mathematical calculations between Levinas and the sugya he treats in "The (...) Pact" suggest that the Talmud assumes a Rousseauian amour-propre , and "And God Created Woman" implies that Jewish ethics is not opposed to Jews' assimilation. I instead suggest that Levinas's Talmudic readings serve to promote the fecundity of Judaism; it is only through such "bad" readings that historical determinism can be conquered, and a messianic future becomes possible. (shrink)

In the spirit of this group of articles commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Journal of Religious Ethics, dealing with tradition-based reasoning, this article takes up a passage from Deuteronomy 20 that allows the “fearful and faint-hearted” person not to participate in battle, as well as the rabbinic and medieval appropriations of this passage in the Jewish tradition. It argues that this verse gives primacy to affect in a way that complicates standard interpretations of the Jewish tradition on just war (...) and allows us to see the pliability of tradition. Finally, the article argues that scholars assessing the justice of conflicts need to attend to the circulation of affects in a reasoning community, as is currently happening on scholarship on moral injury. (shrink)

We are now, I think, in the midst of a sea change in Levinas interpretation. Increasingly in the course of the last third of the twentieth century, Levinas’s phenomenological ethics was seen as a resource for intellectuals to protest a certain kind of, shall we say, methodological naturalism in philosophy. Not only scientific positivism but also existential phenomenology with its apparent emphasis on immanence were feared to be terminally infected with neopagan or proto-fascist elements. If the result of these movements (...) was an embrace of (or a failure to adequately critique) modern secularized civilization and its bureaucratized projects — problematic because such a dimension of modernity was a necessary but not sufficient condition of the Holocaust, as ZygmuntBauman has argued — then the putative solution was to bend the stick toward the opposite pole. Scholars could invoke either the broadly monotheistic overtones of Levinas’s discourse of the Infinite or the specifically Judaic texts of the Bible and Talmud that Levinas saw himself as translating into philosophy, in the hope that these acts of citation would persuade scholars’ audiences that a return to monotheism or the Judaeo-Christian tradition could get the West past its embarrassingcentury-long flirtation with human-made mass death. This reading of Levinas would be coherent with a broader trend in American thought from the 1950s onward that would include Abraham Joshua Heschel, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Martin Luther King Jr., wherein secularism (especially as evidenced by communism) is the problem, religion is the solution. (shrink)

In accounts of Emmanuel Levinas’s relationship to the Jewish theological tradition, scholars often analyze Levinas’s essays about Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin, and specifically his 1824 book Soul of Life (Nefesh ha-Ḥayyim). This article treats two essays that Levinas wrote in the mid-1980s on that book, and shows that Levinas’s praise for that book involves coming close to endorsing its theology of suffering, a theology that strikes this article’s author as obscene. In Nefesh ha-Ḥayyim, those who suffer deserve their suffering, their (...) suffering is in proportion to the sins that gave rise to it, and their suffering purifies and atones for their sin—in the language of the Jewish theological tradition, “it is God’s way to sweeten bitter with bitter.” This marks a departure from Levinas’s standard treatment of issues of theodicy in essays such as “Useless Suffering” (1982). In the article’s conclusion, the possibility is raised that Levinas’s account of divine illeity liberates theologians from problems of theodicy. (shrink)

In accounts of Emmanuel Levinas’s relationship to the Jewish theological tradition, scholars often analyze Levinas’s essays about Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin, and specifically his 1824 book Soul of Life. This article treats two essays that Levinas wrote in the mid-1980s on that book, and shows that Levinas’s praise for that book involves coming close to endorsing its theology of suffering, a theology that strikes this article’s author as obscene. In Nefesh ha-Ḥayyim, those who suffer deserve their suffering, their suffering is (...) in proportion to the sins that gave rise to it, and their suffering purifies and atones for their sin—in the language of the Jewish theological tradition, “it is God’s way to sweeten bitter with bitter.” This marks a departure from Levinas’s standard treatment of issues of theodicy in essays such as “Useless Suffering”. In the article’s conclusion, the possibility is raised that Levinas’s account of divine illeity liberates theologians from problems of theodicy. (shrink)

The second volume of The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy provides a comprehensive overview of Jewish philosophy from the seventeenth century to the present day. Written by a distinguished group of experts in the field, its essays examine how Jewish thinking was modified in its encounter with modern Europe and America and challenge longstanding assumptions about the nature and purpose of modern Jewish philosophy. The volume also treats modern Jewish philosophy's continuities with premodern texts and thinkers, the relationship between philosophy (...) and theology, the ritual and political life of the people of Israel and the ways in which classic modern philosophical categories help or hinder Jewish self-articulation. These essays offer readers a multi-faceted understanding of the Jewish philosophical enterprise in the modern period. (shrink)

In the 1980s and 1990s, the theoretical energy in the study of religion came from postmodern theory and its appropriation by scholars who worked in, or at the margins of, the subfield called “philosophy of religion.” Today, philosophy of religion—at least in departments of religion and religious studies—threatens to kill itself with its own jargon; the theoretical energy in the study of religion comes from young scholars working in American religious history (such as John Modern, author of Secularism in Antebellum (...) America) and a coterie of thinkers associated with the journal Method and Theory in the Study of Religion (MTSR), notably Russell McCutcheon and Timothy Fitzgerald. These thinkers and others argue in various ways that the academic study of religion is rightly constrained by its academic context, and therefore requires the bracketing of all discourse from the study of religion (whether in the discipline of history of religions, or that of theology) that assumes a natural human. (shrink)

In all of these discourses, she has sought to cultivate an awareness of how the self is situated and influenced, as well as the ways in which a self can influence others.In this volume, twelve scholars examine and display the influence of ...

The writings of Martha Nussbaum broadly defend an account of transcendence as internal, always rooted in the human context. Her account implies that any and all projects of normative theological ethics are superfluous, since they transcend the natural bounds of human experience and reason. This essay points toward a space for theology, specifically Jewish theology, in Nussbaum's work, through an analysis of her recent philosophical and autobiographical writings on Judaism. Nussbaum's account in Upheavals of Thought associates Judaism with carnality and (...) vulnerability; this essay supplements her account by pointing to a non-natural origin of emotional judgments in some of the texts Nussbaum treats. This move serves to temper the emphasis on autonomy in liberal Jewish thought, and provides an account of transcendence which can serve as the basis of a more traditional Jewish theological ethics. (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)

Exploring the status of feminism in this "postfeminist" age, this sophisticated meditation on feminist thinking over the past three decades moves away from the all too common dependence on French theorists and male thinkers and instead builds on a wide-ranging body of feminist theory written by women. These writings address the question "Where are we going?" as well as "Where have we come from?" As evidenced in the essays compiled here, the multiplicity of directions available to this new feminism ranges (...) from poststructuralist academic theory through cultural activism to re-readings of law, literature, and representation. Contributors include Mieke Bal, Lauren Berlant, Rosi Braidotti, Elisabeth Bronfen, Judith Butler, Rey Chow, Drucilla Cornell, Ann Cvetkovich, Jane Gallop, Beatrice Hanssen, Claire Kahane, Ranjana Khanna, Biddy Martin, Juliet Mitchell, Anita Haya Patterson, and Valerie Smith. _Feminist Consequences_, representing the forefront of international feminist thought, marks a new and long-desired stage of feminist criticism where women are themselves making theory rather than reacting to male production. (shrink)

In the early months of 1991, the United States—in alliance with a number of other nations—fought a large scale air and ground war to evict Iraq's occupying army from the emirate of Kuwait. In this paper, I will consider the question of whether this U.S. military campaign was a just war according to the criteria of traditional just war theory—the only developed moral theory of warfare that we have. My aim, however, is not so much to reach a verdict about (...) the morality of the Gulf War, as it is to identify relevant moral issues, and to reveal certain serious problems of application that are inherent in just war theory itself. Just war theory divides into two parts concerning, respectively, the question of whether or not to fight a particular war , and the question of how the war is conducted . I begin by considering whether it was just, according to the justice of war criteria, for the U.S. to fight the Gulf War at all. I then turn to the question of whether the way the war was conducted satisfied the criteria of justice in war. (shrink)

In fact, it requires two major social institutions--morality and government--working in a coordinated fashion to do so. This is one of the main themes of Hobbes's philosophy that will be developed in this book.

A long-standing theme in discussion of perception and thought has been that our primary cognitive contact with individual objects and events in the world derives from our perceptual contact with them. When I look at a duck in front of me, I am not merely presented with the fact that there is at least one duck in the area, rather I seem to be presented withthisthing (as one might put it from my perspective) in front of me, which looks to (...) me to be a duck. Furthermore, such a perception would seem to put me in a position not merely to make the existential judgment that there is some duck or other present, but rather to make a singular, demonstrative judgment, that that is a duck. My grounds for an existential judgment in this case derives from my apprehension of the demonstrative thought and not vice versa. (shrink)

On Inception is a translation of Martin Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe 70. This work belongs to the crucial period, before and during WWII, when Heidegger was at work on a series of treatises that begins with "Contributions to Philosophy" and includes "The Event" and "The History of Beyng." These works are difficult, even hermetic, but represent a crucial development in Heidegger's thinking. On Inception deepens the investigation underway in the other volumes of the series and provides a unique perspective on Heidegger's (...) thinking of Being and of Event. Here, Heidegger asks, with a greater insistence than anywhere else in his work, what it might mean to think of being as event, and not as presence. Event cannot be thought without the sense of a beginning - an inception - and so, Heidegger insists, we must try to think of being as inception, as fundamentally inceptive. On Inception pursues rigorously the difficult and puzzling implications of this speculation. It does not merely extend work already undertaken but also opens doors onto wholly other pathways. (shrink)

Is it OK to lie to Siri? Is it bad to mistreat a robot for our own pleasure? Under what condition should we grant a moral status to an artificial intelligence (AI) system? This paper looks at different arguments for granting moral status to an AI system: the idea of indirect duties, the relational argument, the argument from intelligence, the arguments from life and information, and the argument from sentience. In each but the last case, we find unresolved issues with (...) the particular argument, which leads us to move to a different one. We leave the idea of indirect duties aside since these duties do not imply considering an AI system for its own sake. The paper rejects the relational argument and the argument from intelligence. The argument from life may lead us to grant a moral status to an AI system, but only in a weak sense. Sentience, by contrast, is a strong argument for the moral status of an AI system—based, among other things, on the Aristotelian principle of equality: that same cases should be treated in the same way. The paper points out, however, that no AI system is sentient given the current level of technological development. (shrink)

Why do we need government? A common view is that government is necessary to constrain people's conduct toward one another, because people are not sufficiently virtuous to exercise the requisite degree of control on their own. This view was expressed perspicuously, and artfully, by liberal thinker James Madison, in The Federalist, number 51, where he wrote: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Madison's idea is shared by writers ranging across the political spectrum. It finds clear expression in (...) the Marxist view that the state will gradually wither away after a communist revolution, as unalienated “communist man” emerges. And it is implied by the libertarian view that government's only legitimate function is to control the unfortunate and immoral tendency of some individuals to violate the moral rights of others. (shrink)

Over the past three decades, the philosophy of biology has emerged from the shadow of the philosophy of physics to become a respectable and thriving philosophical subdiscipline. The authors take a fresh look at the life sciences and the philosophy of biology from a strictly realist and emergentist-naturalist perspective. They outline a unified and science-oriented philosophical framework that enables the clarification of many foundational and philosophical issues in biology. This book will be of interest both to life scientists and philosophers.

We provide a battery of examples of delusions against which theoretical accounts can be tested. Then, we identify neuropsychological anomalies that could produce the unusual experiences that may lead, in turn, to the delusions in our battery. However, we argue against Maher’s view that delusions are false beliefs that arise as normal responses to anomalous experiences. We propose, instead, that a second factor is required to account for the transition from unusual experience to delusional belief. The second factor in the (...) aetiology of delusions can be described superficially as a loss of the ability to reject a candidate for belief on the grounds of its implausibility and its inconsistency with everything else that the patient knows. But we point out some problems that confront any attempt to say more about the nature of this second factor. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy reflects his famous philosophical "turning." In this work, Heidegger returns to the question of being from its inception in Being and Time to a new questioning of being as event.

What exactly is hope and how does it influence our decisions? In How We Hope, Adrienne Martin presents a novel account of hope, the motivational resources it presupposes, and its function in our practical lives. She contends that hoping for an outcome means treating certain feelings, plans, and imaginings as justified, and that hope thereby involves sophisticated reflective and conceptual capacities. Martin develops this original perspective on hope--what she calls the "incorporation analysis"--in contrast to the two dominant philosophical (...) conceptions of hope: the orthodox definition, where hoping for an outcome is simply desiring it while thinking it possible, and agent-centered views, where hoping for an outcome is setting oneself to pursue it. In exploring how hope influences our decisions, she establishes that it is not always a positive motivational force and can render us complacent. She also examines the relationship between hope and faith, both religious and secular, and identifies a previously unnoted form of hope: normative or interpersonal hope. When we place normative hope in people, we relate to them as responsible agents and aspire for them to overcome challenges arising from situation or character. Demonstrating that hope merits rigorous philosophical investigation, both in its own right and in virtue of what it reveals about the nature of human emotion and motivation, How We Hope offers an original, sustained look at a largely neglected topic in philosophy. (shrink)