Negotiating the relation between divine transcendence and divine immanence lies at the heart of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed and of Kierkegaard's philosophical works. The purpose of the paper is to explore the manners in which they do so. I argue that despite various differences between them, both engage with the tension between divine transcendence and immanence by turning away from objectivity to subjectivity and, moreover, by placing paradox, riddle and secret at the heart of their philosophical works. In other (...) words, I argue that they do not attempt to solve or dissolve the great paradox of God's immanent transcendence but to present it in its most acute forms as the paradox within which the religious life is lived. (shrink)

Argues that Nietzsche tried to create a specific literary character in his writings and discusses the paradoxes of his work.

Neither art nor philosophy was kind to beauty during the twentieth century. Much modern art disdains beauty, and many philosophers deeply suspect that beauty merely paints over or distracts us from horrors. Intellectuals consigned the passions of beauty to the margins, replacing them with the anemic and rarefied alternative, "aesthetic pleasure." In Only a Promise of Happiness, Alexander Nehamas reclaims beauty from its critics. He seeks to restore its place in art, to reestablish the connections among art, beauty, and desire, (...) and to show that the values of art, independently of their moral worth, are equally crucial to the rest of life.Nehamas makes his case with characteristic grace, sensitivity, and philosophical depth, supporting his arguments with searching studies of art and literature, high and low, from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Manet's Olympia to television. Throughout, the discussion of artworks is generously illustrated.Beauty, Nehamas concludes, may depend on appearance, but this does not make it superficial. The perception of beauty manifests a hope that life would be better if the object of beauty were part of it. This hope can shape and direct our lives for better or worse. We may discover misery in pursuit of beauty, or find that beauty offers no more than a tantalizing promise of happiness. But if beauty is always dangerous, it is also a pressing human concern that we must seek to understand, and not suppress. (shrink)

For much of its history, philosophy was not merely a theoretical discipline but a way of life, an "art of living." This practical aspect of philosophy has been much less dominant in modernity than it was in ancient Greece and Rome, when philosophers of all stripes kept returning to Socrates as a model for living. The idea of philosophy as an art of living has survived in the works of such major modern authors as Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Each of (...) these writers has used philosophical discussion as a means of establishing what a person is and how a worthwhile life is to be lived. In this wide-ranging, brilliantly written account, Alexander Nehamas provides an incisive reevaluation of Socrates' place in the Western philosophical tradition and shows the importance of Socrates for Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Why does each of these philosophers—each fundamentally concerned with his own originality—return to Socrates as a model? The answer lies in the irony that characterizes the Socrates we know from the Platonic dialogues. Socratic irony creates a mask that prevents a view of what lies behind. How Socrates led the life he did, what enabled or inspired him, is never made evident. No tenets are proposed. Socrates remains a silent and ambiguous character, forcing readers to come to their own conclusions about the art of life. This, Nehamas shows, is what allowed Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault to return to Socrates as a model without thereby compelling them to imitate him. This highly readable, erudite study argues for the importance of the tradition within Western philosophy that is best described as "the art of living" and casts Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault as the three major modern representatives of this tradition. Full of original ideas and challenging associations, this work will offer new ways of thinking about the philosophers Nehamas discusses and about the discipline of philosophy itself. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of forgiveness ordinarily emphasize three components: i) the overcoming of hostile emotions toward the wrongdoer; ii) a change of heart toward the wrongdoer, which goes beyond the cessation of hostile emotions and involves the acquisition of a more positive attitude toward him or her; iii) a willingness to restore the relationship and proceed toward reconciliation. In this paper, I examine these three presumed components, endorsing the first but rejecting the second and the third as unnecessary features of forgiveness. (...) I thus argue that forgiveness is, first and foremost, a unilateral, intra-psychic process that does not necessarily lead to reconciliation or to the fostering of friendly relations. The paper has three parts. In the first part, I argue that overcoming resentment toward one’s assailant by coming to view oneself more favourably lies at the core of forgiveness. In the second part, I show that one need not be able to view one’s assailant in a different and more favourable light to be able to overcome one’s resentment and forgive one’s assailant. Furthermore, in the third part, I argue that a wholly negative view of the wrongdoer, moral hatred and a refusal to be reconciled with him or her are compatible with forgiving him or her. (shrink)

The paper explores the manners in which suffering, both natural and moral suffering, is understood and defeated in the lives of different ‘knights of faith,’ who emerge in ‘conversation’ with the book of Job. I begin with Maimonides’ Job who emerges as a ‘knight of wisdom’; it is through wisdom that his suffering is defeated, dissolving into mere pain. I proceed with Kierkegaard’s Job, who emerges as a ‘knight of loving trust,’ who defeats suffering by seeing it as a divine (...) gift, and by obediently and lovingly accepting it as such. Through his loving trust, suffering transforms into blessedness and joy, without diminishing or disappearing, a transformation referred to as a ‘miracle’ by Kierkegaard. I end with my own Hasidic-inspired Job, whom I portray as a ‘knight of protest,’ who defeats what he takes to be divine abuse by protesting against it, forgiving God while refusing to be reconciled with Him. I argue that it is by paying attention to these diverse Jobs that the complex nature of faith can be elucidated. Moreover, I argue that all three Jobs, despite their differences, may be embraced, both from a philosophically descriptive perspective as well as from a religiously committed one. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the centrality of aspect seeing in Wittgenstein's philosophy, with some analogies between religious beliefs and aspect seeing, and with the implications of these analogies for the question of the justification of religious beliefs. If belief in God is neither a hypothesis nor a regular perceptual belief but rather a type of aspect seeing, then the kinds of proofs and justifications that are applicable to it would have to engage the non-believer in a manner that would (...) help her experience the dawning of a new aspect. This is why the standard philosophical proofs for theism, even when accepted as valid, are likely to be unsuccessful in bringing about faith. (shrink)

In the field of philosophy, Plato's view of rhetoric as a potentially treacherous craft has long overshadowed Aristotle's view, which focuses on rhetoric as an independent discipline that relates in complex ways to dialectic and logic and to ethics and moral psychology. This volume, composed of essays by internationally renowned philosophers and classicists, provides the first extensive examination of Aristotle's Rhetoric and its subject matter in many years. One aim is to locate both Aristotle's treatise and its subject within the (...) more general context of his philosophical treatment of other disciplines, including moral and political theory as well as poetics. The contributors also seek to illuminate the structure of Aristotle's own conception of rhetoric as presented in his treatise. The first section of the book, which deals with the arguments of rhetoric, contains essays by M. F. Burnyeat and Jacques Brunschwig. A section treating the status of the art of rhetoric features pieces by Eckart Schütrumpf, Jürgen Sprute, M. M. McCabe, and Glenn W. Most. Essays by John M. Cooper, Stephen Halliwell, and Jean-Louis Labarrière address topics related to rhetoric, ethics, and politics. The final section, on rhetoric and literary art, comprises essays by Alexander Nehamas and André Laks. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

The aim of interpretation is to capture the past in the future: to capture, not to recapture, first, because the iterative prefix suggests that meaning, which was once manifest, must now be found again. But the postulated author dispenses with this assumption. Literary texts are produced by very complicated actions, while the significance of even our simplest acts is often far from clear. Parts of the meaning of a text may become clear only because of developments occurring long after its (...) composition. And though the fact that an author means something may be equivalent to the fact that a writer could have meant it, this is not to say that the writer did, on whatever level, actually mean it.Alexander Nehamas, professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, has written articles on ancient Greek philosophy, literary theory, Nietzsche and Thomas Mann. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to bring together two thinkers that are concerned with the limits of what can be said, Wittgenstein and Maimonides, and to explore the sense of the good life and of the mystical to which their therapeutic linguistic work gives rise. I argue that despite the similarities, two different senses of the "mystical" are brought to light and two different "forms of life" are explicated and recommended. The paper has three parts. In the first part, (...) I discuss certain key components in Wittgenstein’s early philosophy and the sense of the mystical to which they give rise. In the second part, I discuss Maimonides’ negative theology and its implications for his conception of the ’via mystica’. I end, with a discussion of the relation between the two ideals and its significance. (shrink)

Nietzsche often gives the impression that all human beliefs are false. Some scholars, like Maudemarie Clark, believe that such a “falsification thesis” is unacceptable and try to limit Nietzsche's commitment to it, claiming that he abandons it in his very last works. Others, like Lanier Anderson and Nadeem Hussain, take it in ways that make it true and locate it in all. I argue that the view that is common to both approaches—that Nietzsche held that thesis in the first place—is (...) unjustified. To that end, I interpret the texts where these scholars claim to find the thesis in a way that shows that they do not commit Nietzsche to it, and I offer some reasons for thinking that this is a more fruitful way of interpreting his views on the importance of truth—and falsehood—and their function in the economy of human life. (shrink)

Sam Lebens’ The Principles of Judaism is an extraordinary book in its rigor and richness. It is a sophisticated examination of three central propositions, which Lebens maintains, are the fundamental doctrines that “can make sense of continued commitment to an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle.” (Lebens, 273). He presents and discusses the following three propositions: 1) The universe is the creation of one God; 2) The Torah is a divine system of laws and wisdom, revealed by the creator of the universe; and, (...) 3) The creator exercises provi-dential care over his creation, manifest in the creator’s continued sustenance of the world, reward and punishment for human action, and in the promise of ultimate salvation. (Lebens, 3).Lebens presents the principles as they were variously explicated and de-fended in key Jewish texts written by the most influential Jewish thinkers; he then turns to search for “the most plausible rendering of this set of prin-ciples...” (Lebens, 274). After so doing, he specifies those doctrinal compo-nents among them, which he deems necessary “for making sense of commit-ment to Judaism” (Lebens, 275), identifying a “commitment to Judaism” with being “faithful to the tenets of Judaism” in the sense of having faith in them:To the extent that these principles are necessary for making sense of commitment to Judaism, I argue that you cannot be considered faithful to the tenets of Judaism without holding an attitude of faith toward some element of each of the three principles... (Lebens 275).The distance between Lebens’ philosophical and religious outlook and pre-suppositions, as they show themselves in his Principles of Judaism, and my own is great. I shall start with a critique of Lebens’ reduction of Judaism to so-called Orthodox Judaism, and argue that Lebens has no justification for characterizing the principles that he identifies, as the “principles of Judaism” without qualification. I shall then turn to argue that there are grounds for questioning whether the principles that Lebens identifies can be understood as the principles that so-called “Orthodox Jews”, too, have faith in. It is, how-ever, clear that the utterances that Lebens discusses do play a central role within the life of committed Jews. I shall end by proposing that we adopt the later Wittgenstein’s philosophical method for making perspicuous their meaning and their different roles. (shrink)

The purpose of the paper is to explore the presumed link between love and self-sacrifice by exploring the presuppositions through which it is established in Kierkegaard’s thought, and to briefly present a different perspective on those presuppositions. The paper has three parts. I begin with an exploration of the roles of self-sacrifice and the double-danger in Kierkegaard’s thinking about Christian love. In the second part, I focus on the role of the “anxiety of instrumentality”, i.e., the (poor) lover’s anxiety that (...) if s/he benefits from loving then his/her love is impure, in Kierkegaard’s thinking about love and about the paradigmatic role of the despised martyr within it. I end with the Maimonidean conception of love, which allows no space for the poor spouse predicament, presenting the detached prophet/sage as the perfect lover. Unlike the Kierkegaardian paradigm, which links love with giving-up, this paradigm links love with giving, and with pleasure, joy, and happiness, thereby rendering sacrifice and suffering impossible when truly loving. Bringing these paradigms to bear on one another, I conclude that if we wish to reject both the despised martyr and the detached prophet/sage as paradigms of perfect loving then we are to give up the ideal that underlies both paradigms, namely, that it is only in “willing love alone” that we love purely. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for a new conception of religious justifications which takes the performance of miracles as the paradigm of reasoning in religion. The paper has two parts: In the first part, I argue against Swinburne’s parity argument for the existence of God by showing that religious perceptions fit more comfortably among aspect perceptions, e.g., the perceptions of beauty and courage, than among our perceptions of objects and colors. In the second part of the paper I employ the (...) analogy between seeing God and seeing beauty and the moral features of an act to propose a performative and transformative conception of religious reasoning. I argue that an argument in religion is a performance which brings various facts or events into life in a particular manner, so that God may be seen in or through them. Any such performance through which God is seen may be properly called a "miracle". Thus, the performance of miracles, i.e., of acts that are directed at becoming the vehicles throu. (shrink)

Believers regularly refer to God as “forgiving and merciful” when praying for divine forgiveness. If one is committed to divine immutability and impassability, as Maimonides is, one must deny that God is capable, in principle, of acting in a forgiving manner. If one rejects divine impassability, maintaining that God has a psychology, as Muffs does, one must reckon with biblical depictions of divine vengeance and rage. Such depictions suggest that while being capable, in principle, of acting in a forgiving way, (...) God has a difficulty to manage God’s anger and do so in practice. Employing a Wittgensteinian perspective, I argue that utterances, e.g., “God merciful and gracious, slow to anger. . . forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin”, need not be understood as involving mistaken or confused descriptions of God’s nature and manner of acting. Rather, they can be understood as speech-acts of various types and functions: mystical, theurgic and others, that purport to bring about or transform various states of affairs in this world and/or beyond it. As such, they can function as non-semantic instruments that purport to elevate the believer to the “upper worlds”, or as anger-management devices that purport to help God implement His second order desire to act in a forgiving manner, despite His difficulty to do so. (shrink)

Martyrdom has played and continues to play a dominant role in the religious imagination of many. Jews and Christians alike conceive of their martyrs as exceptional people of faith who express exceptional love and devotion to God. The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the conceptual features of martyrdom by virtue of which it has its role and to show, using those very features and using Simone Weil's observations, that martyrdom cannot mark the logical climax of the (...) believer's love of God. (shrink)

The paper explores the nature and role of divine transcendence in Maimonides by focusing on the figure of Job as he is understood by him. In the first part, I discuss Maimonides’ diagnosis of Job’s suffering. In the second, I focus on Maimonides’ analysis of the nature of its defeat, and the manners in which that defeat involves the mediation of divine transcendence and hiddenness. In the third, I discuss some of the difficulties involved within the picture presented in the (...) second part, namely, Maimonides’ seeming commitment to two incompatible conceptions of divine transcendence. I argue that the incompatible accounts need not be harmonized since the Guide of the Perplexed is not a textbook that attempts to provide a doctrine concerning the nature of divine transcendence and its relation to the world. Rather, its purpose is to present a riddle, the great riddle of divine transcendence, around which Jewish life, as he understands it, is built. This riddle, for Maimonides, cannot be solved or dissolved; rather, it has to be recognized and embraced. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the nature of Kierkegaard’s commitment to God’s loving providence as it shows itself in his writings in general, and in his remarks on Governance’s Part in his Authorship in particular. I argue that, for Kierkegaard, God’s loving providence is not an objective fact that he discovers as intervening in nature, history or in his private life and authorship. Rather, God’s loving providence is fundamentally hidden in the wretchedness of existence. God is like a hidden experimenter (...) who does not intervene in his experiment. Thus, the passion of faith determines the issue, for Kierkegaard. God’s loving Governance is realized in inwardness, in loving the neighbor, and in living this love in self-denial, obedience and suffering. (shrink)

A contribution to the sixth installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Apology for Quietism,” this article compares the worldview of Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes) and the quietism that it presumably entails to the early Wittgenstein's worldview and his quietism. The first section of the article treats a relevant paradox in the worldview of the early Wittgenstein: his positive exhortations for certain types of speech and silence, for certain types of action and inaction, seem in conflict with his statement that, in the world, (...) “there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.” The second section examines an internal paradox in the worldview of Qoheleth, who commends the enjoyment of a world that he considers meaningless and vain. The third and final section of the article compares these paradoxes as constitutive of the texts in which they appear. Conveying no univocal message, while both writers exhibit quietism, they also gesture toward kinds of speech and action. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the question of the existence of moral dilemmas, conceived of as situations involving a subject in a conflict of non‐overridden moral obligations. I reject some of the presuppositions underlying discussions of this question and argue that certain morally relevant choices cannot be evaluated in relation to an all‐things‐considered moral obligation as permissible or impermissible, right or wrong. In arguing for the inadequacy of our ordinary moral predicates for fully capturing the nature of such choices, I (...) argue that they are, in certain respects, inexpressible. (shrink)

Problems with representing friendship in painting and the novel and its more successful displays in drama reflect the fact that friends seldom act as inspiringly as traditional images of the relationship suggest: friends' activities are often trivial, commonplace and boring, sometimes even criminal. Despite all that, the philosophical tradition has generally considered friendship a moral good. I argue that it is not a moral good, but a good nonetheless. It provides opportunities to try different ways of being, and is crucial (...) to the processes through which we establish our individuality. (shrink)