As a political thinker nurtured in early 20th-century German, Hannah Arendt is most often identified with the Greek philosophical tradition. This article argues that the crisis in reality that threw her into politics also, though unacknowledgedly, threw her into ‘Jewish modes of thinking’ as an alternative source where she found the Greek tradition lacking. This claim is controversial, given Arendt’s vehement criticisms of any recourse to the absolute, or metaphysical truths in the realm of politics. Nevertheless, and consistent with a (...) number of early 20th-century Jewish thinkers who explicitly identified the Hebrew God not as the metaphysical but as the condition of possibility for authentic freedom under conditions of finitude, one finds in Arendt a move towards an understanding of the seat of human freedom that sits far more comfortably in the Jerusalem than in the Athens tradition. Specifically, in her emphasis on natality and genuine futurity, one senses a strong resonance with the notion of pure creation in the Hebrew Bible, as one does, notably, in her insistence that forgiveness and promises form the two pillars for human sociality. Throughout the history of Jewish thought, one consistently finds precisely this Arendtian struggle to represent a model of law that holds the tension between binding fidelity to promises, memory and the past, and an openness to futurity, to the infinity of interpretation that gives meaning to those promises. Closely resembling the midrashic tradition, Arendt’s political community of speech is one in which meaning is open ended and plural, allowing for the binding together that sustains a polity, while also opening up to the radically new of each new birth. (shrink)

Frangeskou’s point of departure in his juxtaposition of Levinas and Kant is the problem of transcenden- tal schematism but not the tension between autonomy and heteronomy as it is common for most of the published literature. Thus, the middle ground between Levinas and Kant is occupied by Heidegger, but also by Franz Rosenzweig with his “biblical” version of ecstatic temporality. Levinassian diachrony is described by Frangeskou as a new form of ecstatic temporality, different from the interpretations given by Heidegger and (...) Rosenzweig. It is analogous to transcendental schematism of reason. We briefly com- pare Frangeskou’s interpretation with Marc Richir’s notion of transcendental schematism which also goes back to Levinassian diachronic temporality. Richir’s schematism functions as a medium joining together heterogenous elements such as the layer of “phenomenological”, i.e., the unstable and flick- ering sense, and the layer of “symbolic”, i.e., the organised and stabilised sense. In a similar way, for Frangeskou, diachronic temporality provides a synthesis (though, not a synchronisation) of God, the world and a man. (shrink)

Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas are three of the most prominent Jewish philosophers of the 20th century. This paper looks at the different understandings each author offers of intersubjectivity and authentic self-hood and questions the extent to which for each author God plays a role in interpersonal relationships.

Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas are three of the most prominent Jewish philosophers of the 20thcentury. This paper looks at the different understandings each author offers of intersubjectivity and authentic self-hood and questions the extent to which for each author God plays a role in interpersonal relationships.

The project behind this and the following1 special issue of Angelaki first assumed concrete form in the shape of a three-day international conference, “Continental Philosophy and the Sciences,” hel...

Resumen Este artículo tiene como objetivo analizar el debate filosófico entre Ernst Cassirer y Martin Heidegger en el periodo de entreguerras, a partir de su modo disímil de comprender la libertad del hombre como proceso de autoconfiguración del sujeto o Dasein. En primer lugar, se examinará la reinterpretación global de la filosofía kantiana por parte de ambos pensadores a la luz de sus proyectos filosóficos: en el caso de Cassirer, la filosofía de las formas simbólicas, en el de Heidegger, la (...) hermenéutica de la facticidad. En segundo lugar, se analizarán sus interpretaciones sobre el pensamiento estético de Friedrich Schiller, en el marco de sus reflexiones sobre la función del arte para la comprensión de la Selbstbildung. Ello permitirá iluminar un nuevo aspecto de esta disputa, así como determinar la distancia entre sus dos orientaciones filosóficas y políticas.This paper aims to analyze the philosophical debate between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger in the interwar period, starting from their dissimilar way of understanding human freedom as a process of selfconfiguration of the subject or Dasein. First, we will examine the global reinterpretation of Kantian philosophy by both thinkers in the light of their philosophical projects: in the case of Cassirer, the philosophy of symbolic forms, in the case of Heidegger, the hermeneutics of facticity. Second, their interpretations of the aesthetic thought of Friedrich Schiller will be analyzed, within the framework of their reflections on the function of art for the understanding of the Selbstbildung. This will illuminate a new aspect of this debate and determine the distance between their two philosophical and political orientations. (shrink)

This essay traces the development of Levinas’s conception of Judaism from 1928 to1947 with an aim to reveal how Levinas’s postwar conceptions of Jewish election and anti-historicism derive from his early treatments of the Heideggerian themes of Geworfenheit (thrownness) and historicality. In the process, I show how the similarities that Levinas perceived between Heidegger and Rosenzweig allowed him to recast Heideggerian categories in Jewish terms. Finally the essay considers the potential political implications and tensions that follow from Levinas’s concern after (...) World War II to maintain Rosenzweig’s contention that Judaism stands outside of History. (shrink)

This essay reveals the destructive possibility inherent in the deformalization of the Kantian notion of time governing Levinas' engagement with Rosenzweig. It demonstrates that this programme of deformalization not only retains Rosenzweig's idea that the abstract aspects of time can be deformalized, and thus grounded concretely, in the biblical events of temporality, but also moves toward an ethical destruction of the schematism understood as an exposition of the temporality of the Other which can be distinguished essentially as a threefold grounding (...) of time in the Kantian sense. This unique connection between the temporality of the Other and this ethical destruction of the schematism is then developed according to the ontological destruction of the schematism in Heidegger's exposition of the problematic of temporality on the one hand, and to the repetition or renewal of this temporal problematic of the schematism in Levinas' deformalization of the Kantian notion of time on the other. The essay concludes.. (shrink)

In this article, the relation between crisis, dying, and apocalypse is examined from the vantage point of Franz Rosenzweig's philosophy of revelation. Following Rosenzweig's suggestion that truth-for finite and temporal beings like us-can only be found in time, the article suggests that there exists an intrinsic relation between truth and death. Truth is not only or even primarily logical or mathematical truth according to Rosenzweig. Truth is the reality of our finite lives and implies an eschatological understanding of death as (...) that which gives life unity by eternalising it as that which it forever was in the past. Life, Rosenzweig argues, is polytheistic by entailing manifold perspectives and possibilities, while death is monotheistic by endowing living beings with the unity and completion they lack in life. All death, even the most horrid death, is, if not a completion, at least an end, which gives the living the possibility to judge and verify the meaning of the past once and for all. Yet, if we believe Rosenzweig, the dead are not gone in the past but rather the eternal ground that makes present and future time possible. The dead, by literally being the past, reveal that all time exists after itself, as something that already was, and that the world is nothing but a world with many ends by dying away into the "life outside life" that Rosenzweig called God. (shrink)