The initial problem for feminist Jewish theology has been its very definition as theology. Whereas, from its beginning, Christian feminism has defined the transformation of theology as a major goal, the nature and boundaries of the Jewish feminist project have been more amorphous. In part, this is because the theological tradition to which Christian feminists react is highly systematized. The nature and methodology of theology are more open questions in Judaism. Biblical and rabbinic Judaisms embody a variety of theologies in (...) narrative, prayer, law, and textual exegesis. While in every period of postbiblical Judaism there have been influential theologies utilizing philosophical forms and categories, there is no standard way of systematizing their Jewish content. That is because Jewish philosophical theologies serve dual purposes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and Well-BeingDaniel H. FrankHava Tirosh-Samuelson. Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and Well-Being. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 596. Cloth, $50.00.Franz Rosenzweig tried hard to convince the neoKantian Hermann Cohen of the merits of Zionism and the normalization it would bring to Jews and Jewish life. His attempt met with this response from Cohen: "Oho! So the gang (...) now wants to be happy, does it?" For those ignorant of the history of Jewish philosophy, one might imagine that Jewish philosophers, no less than their non-philosophical kinsmen, were so weighed down by the burdens of history and persecution that happiness could play no role in their theorizing. But happiness plays a key role in the history of Jewish moral and political philosophy, especially in the premodern period. Even Spinoza, the last of the medievals and the first of the moderns, the great critic of the rabbinic tradition and of Maimonides in particular, is concerned in his Ethics with identifying those activities that together constitute human well-being and the good life. Only lately, since the Enlightenment and Kant, has non-eudaimonism been a live option for Jewish thinkers. Only with the rise of (modern) Orthodoxy, and its predilection for construing goodness as rectitude and rule-following, has eudaimonism fallen out of favor. But with Tirosh-Samuelson's weighty volume on happiness in premodern Judaism, there can be no excuse in the future to imagine that all Jews are, or must be, closet Kantians, strict deontologists. To think otherwise seems to come close to taking on the classical (anti-Semitic) dichotomy of legalistic Judaism vs. spiritual Christianity. In it own way, Happiness in Premodern Judaism is a critique of such a one-sided, monochromatic view of Judaism, whether from the Christian or even from the Jewish side.Tirosh-Samuelson writes explicitly as an intellectual historian, rather than as a philosopher. She understands herself and her project as one that presents just the facts, without evaluating them. While one may cavil at a lost opportunity, in the present case this would be churlish, given the enormous erudition on display. After an introductory chapter outlining the foundational moral theories of Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic philosophers, the text presents the (Greek-inspired) areteic wisdom literature of the Second Temple period, the teleological theocentrism of the rabbis, the Greco-Arabic Islamicate culture that nurtured Jewish philosophers from Saadia in the tenth century to Maimonides in the twelfth, the rabbinic and kabbalistic critiques of the philosophical ideal of happiness commencing [End Page 338] with the translation (into Hebrew) of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and finally, very important and the focus of much recent scholarly work, the transformation of Jewish eudaimonism through direct contact with Christian Scholasticism and later with the humanist Renaissance. All in all, a millennium and a half of Jewish intellectual history is presented in a sober and scholarly way.Not surprisingly Maimonides plays a pivotal role in the story that Tirosh-Samuelson relates. A Janus-like figure, he represents the culmination and height of accommodation with Greek and Greco-Arabic philosophical culture. However, with the gradual worsening of the socio-economic condition of European Jewry in the thirteenth century, his accommodationism seemed traitorous, and as a result generations of thinkers, mystics and philosophers alike, strove to critically distance themselves from Maimonidean Aristotelianism. Tirosh-Samuelson is admirably clear in pointing out that such anti-Maimonidean tendencies are ill-characterized as anti-philosophical. Hasdai Crescas in the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries launched a massive critique of Maimonides' physics, metaphysics, and moral philosophy, but did so in as rigorous a manner as any philosopher would. The picture that enfolds over the course of the text is one of vigorous dialectic between partisans of 'alien' (Greek) wisdom and those who viewed such wisdom with considerable suspicion. Such a dialectic parallels, not surprisingly, developments in Christian philosophy.The trajectory of the story of premodern Jewish musings on happiness is from the centrality of reason and intellect, and the contemplative activity that is reason's preeminent actuality, to the primacy... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Does Judaism Condone Violence? Holiness and Ethics in the Jewish Tradition by Alan L. MittlemanMatthew LeveringDoes Judaism Condone Violence? Holiness and Ethics in the Jewish Tradition by Alan L. Mittleman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), v + 227 pp.Alan Mittleman has written a profoundly thought-provoking book. A main question of the book is whether a higher (revealed) law may in some cases require harm to be done (...) to the neighbor—harm that otherwise would be unjust. Mittleman offers some fascinating examples of cases in which Jews have appealed to God's Law in order to justify oppression of Gentiles. He cites a contemporary halakhic text, Torat ha-Melekh (The King's Torah), as particularly egregious. While Torat ha-Melekh was widely condemned by rabbis and the general public in Israel, it had an audience among the ultra-Orthodox. According to the Torat ha-Melekh, Gentiles' souls are not intrinsically holy in the way that Jews' souls are. This means that killing Gentile children in wartime may be acceptable due to the threat that otherwise these children may grow up to kill Jews. The Torat ha-Melekh observes that many Gentiles do not practice and obey the seven Noachide commandments. Since this is so, the Gentiles who do not obey the Noachide commandments live "in an inhuman state, where the brutish nature of their souls has free rein and their lives have lost value" (186).Another example given by Mittleman is the status of the Holy Land and the Holy People. Insofar as the holiness of the land and people is thought to be intrinsic—an inseparable property—problems can arise. According to a midrash in Bereshit Rabbah, the land is so intrinsically holy that only the dead who are buried in the land—or whose dead bodies somehow travel to the land—will rise from the dead and enjoy everlasting resurrected life. Likewise, the land's air is presented as uniquely making its inhabitants wise, and the divine presence or shekinah comes only in the land. For the medieval Jewish philosopher Yehuda Halevi, in his Kuzari: The Book of Refutation and Proof on Behalf of the Most Despised Religion (ca. 1140), the land of Israel is the most temperate climate and the most conducive to producing the ideal human beings. In addition, Halevi thinks that only certain descendants of Adam are "true Adamites" (66). A true Adamite is a son of God, just as Adam was. Specifically, only Seth and some of his descendants are fully human in accord with the Adamic model. It is only in the family of Jacob that "God's influence [finally] becomes the property of an entire people" (67). The true Adamites are Adam's (and Jacob's) seed; other humans are comparatively speaking mere husks. Although people can convert to Judaism, therefore, converts cannot be equal to those born of the Jewish nation. This does not mean that all who descend from Jacob are holy, since [End Page 745] it is possible for a Jew to distort his or her purity of soul. Nevertheless, for Halevi the Jewish people are a holy seed that is intrinsically superior to all other humans, so that it is possible to say that "Israel is an angelomorphic, even theomorphic race" (69).Moses Maimonides responded to Halevi, rejecting his viewpoint completely—on the grounds that holiness is not an intrinsic or biological (let alone racial) property. Yet, Halevi's viewpoint influenced Jewish Kabbalah in a major way. For the Kabbalist text the Zohar, the people of Israel derive from the emanations of the divine, whereas all other nations derive from the impure powers. The Zohar holds, "The other nations count for nothing in God's sight. They are the products of Eve's illicit union with the serpent," rather than coming forth from the theomorphic being who was Adam (70). Similarly, Moses de Leon—thought to be an author of the Zohar—argues that Gentiles ontologically possess impure souls that will carry them to spiritual damnation and will ensure that they have no participation in the resurrection of the dead. Another Kabbalist, Joseph of Hamadan, makes the same point that Gentiles... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German PhilosophyClaire Elise KatzPeter Eli Gordon. Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. xxix + 328. Cloth, $65.00.Peter Gordon's recent book brings together two seemingly disparate authors—Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Heidegger. Gordon intends to demonstrate that although Franz Rosenzweig is most frequently viewed as a Jewish thinker, this perspective obfuscates his German background, which (...) Gordon argues plays an even more prominent role in his thinking. His claim is that Rosenzweig should be situated within his German background and within German thought in order to gain a broader and more accurate perspective of who he was and what his work means.The book is coherently organized with a substantial introduction that lays the groundwork for the rest of the argument. Here, Gordon introduces us to Rosenzweig, Heidegger, and modern German and Jewish thought. Subsequent discussions explore primary philosophical influences on Rosenzweig's thought, for example, the roots of Rosenzweig's "New Thinking" found in Hermann Cohen and the need for a critique of totality found in Hegel. The central chapters, which offer a re-reading of Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption, are clearly written and are alone worth the time of this book.In these two chapters, Gordon outlines the significance of Rosenzweig's thought as situated within the canon of western philosophy by demonstrating that Rosenzweig's work engages central questions and concerns within the history of philosophy. Primarily, Rosenzweig believes that western philosophy has concerned itself too much with death, the death of the individual and a need to transcend completely from this world. Rosenzweig, contra the history of western philosophy, argues for a philosophical position that emphasizes life here and now—the everyday—and, more importantly, that we remain in time and the world (179). And here he draws interesting comparisons to Heidegger, indicating that these philosophers had a similar relationship to the history of philosophy, both of which were influenced by the German milieu in which they wrote and thought.Gordon ends his study of the relationship between Rosenzweig and Heidegger by drawing our attention to Rosenzweig's last writings, which were in the form of newspaper articles. These writings attended to the Davos Disputation, the now infamous debate between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer. In these articles Rosenzweig indicates his partiality to Heidegger's position, in particular his position on redemption (285 ff.), indicating that Heidegger's philosophical stance represented most clearly Rosenzweig's New Thinking.Regardless of whether one agrees with Gordon's main thesis, this book is an original and significant contribution to philosophy and Jewish thought. Clearly Heidegger does not represent philosophy proper, since we still see grave signs of the split between analytic and "contemporary continental" philosophy; however, he does loom large as a central figure within European philosophy and specifically within German thought. To engage Rosenzweig's views with those of Heidegger brings Rosenzweig into a conversation from which he is normally excluded. And unfortuntately, when Rosenzweig is studied along with other figures such as Emmanuel Levinas, philosophers whose work is outside of Jewish thought will simply claim that Levinas is even more "Jewish" than they thought rather than admit that Rosenzweig is a philosophical thinker worthy of engagement. Although Gordon might hope that Rosenzweig scholars take more notice of the German background of Rosenzweig's thought, instead of circumscribing him within a strictly Jewish context, the engagement with Heidegger might be of more importance for Heidegger scholars and scholars of contemporary European philosophy.My sense is that Rosenzweig scholars in fact do notice the Germanic influence but also see the significance of treating Jewish philosophy as philosophy in its own right. It is "mainstream" philosophy that might need the reminder that Jewish philosophy is also philosophy. As a result, my primary concern is that Gordon's book might have de-emphasized the "Jewish" in order to make room for the "German." At the beginning of the book Gordon tells us that "Levinas was always suspicious of Heidegger." That, actually, is not true. Levinas attended the Davos debate and sided with Heidegger. But the events of the early 1930s led him... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Judaism and EnlightenmentHeidi Morrison RavvenAdam Sutcliffe. Judaism and Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xv + 314. Cloth, $60.00.Adam Sutcliffe's detailed and wide-ranging historical study of the image of the Jews and of Judaism in the minds of Enlightenment thinkers very broadly conceived might better be [End Page 343] titled Enlightenment Myths of Jews and Judaism. Sutcliffe admirably captures the consistently mythic portrayal of Jews and (...) Judaism mostly offered as interpretations of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) rather than with reference to actual living or historical Jews. Although not explicitly acknowledged, what Sutcliffe offers the reader is a comprehensive catalogue of Enlightenment ideology or, better, theologizing about Judaism and the Jews. I say theologizing because the ubiquitous stark ambivalence toward the Jews that Sutcliffe argues Enlightenment thinkers to a person harbored, from the early Christian Hebraists and Kabbalists to the deists, to Voltaire and beyond the Enlightenment proper even to Freud (whom Sutcliffe not completely in jest regards as the last philosophe) echoes and reconfigures the quintessential Christian ambivalence toward Jews as both God's chosen and God's rejected. Christianity's need to legitimate the Hebrew Bible as the Old Testament stands in perpetual conflict with its need to de-legitimate the Jews as its rightful owners and heirs. Sutcliffe is utterly convincing that the Enlightenment conception of the Jews has irreducible mythic and conflictual aspects.The author's intended purpose, however, which is to convince the reader that Judaism and the Jews are the paradigmatic crux of the unassimilability of the mythic and particular by Enlightenment reason and hence to bring into question Enlightenment ideals themselves, is less convincing. Instead the data Sutcliffe amasses seem to point to the conclusion that Enlightenment thinkers were deeply imbued with mythic categories and ancient prejudices not easily sloughed off by mere protestations of rational autonomy and commitment to universal ideals.Sutcliffe's mistake is to grant to the Enlightenment thinkers their ground on both their self-valuation as exemplars of the deployment of universal reason or rational universalism and also their classification of Judaism as particularist mythos in opposition to just such reason. What Sutcliffe's carefully collected and exhaustively presented data suggest, instead, is that when it came to Judaism, the Enlightenment thinkers were neither rational nor universalist but instead culture bound and impassioned. The book's great strength is its admirable and exhaustive scholarly grasp of European Enlightenment works and its systematic presentation of the Jews in the imagination of these Enlighteners. Nevertheless, missing from this book is a scholarly understanding of Jewish sources both biblical and post-biblical and especially of Jewish philosophy. As a result, Judaism (and even the Hebrew Bible) signify to the author what Enlighteners mistakenly and prejudicially cast it as, namely, Europe's quintessential mythic particularism. But this caricature ignores the reality of rabbinic Judaism's profoundly rationalist tendencies and also the universalist aspirations and claims of the Jewish philosophic tradition whose deep roots go back to the Hellenistic era, let alone the universality of the Bible which is hardly less than that of Shakespeare. Hence Sutcliffe perpetuates a negative (and false) stereotype in the name of valorizing it. In this he is persuaded by a post-modernist agenda suggested, but not generally intrusive, throughout the book and made explicit at the end.Particularly jarring is Sutcliffe's inclusion of Spinoza in his catalogue of Enlightenment villifiers of Judaism as a form of unassimilable particularism and mythic primitivism. Spinoza instead clearly and repeatedly argues in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus that biblical Judaism is exemplified par excellence by its universalist ethics and hence it is the Ancient Jewish Commonwealth that ought to serve as an exemplar for the Dutch republic and all modern polities, as Michael Rosenthal has admirably shown in several essays. Spinoza draws this conclusion from the deployment of what he explicitly develops as his scientific method of reading texts, a method he argues is the same as the scientific method of amassing the data of nature and systematizing it in order to let its explanatory categories emerge therefrom (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, vii). The central result of using the scientific method on the Bible... (shrink)

On 2 July 2000, Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority, deferred action on the petition to have Dietrich Bonhoeffer named a righteous gentile. My contention is that critics of this decision conceal a more pernicious difficulty that arises in Bonhoeffer's Lutheran legacy. David Nirenberg's recent Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, demonstrates the history and development of such categories with particular attention to Luther. What goes unnoticed is the ongoing operations of anti-Judaism in later theologians such as Bonhoeffer. Although (...) Bonhoeffer may not have been anti-Semitic, the degree to which his theology remained bound to centuries old anti-Judaism is another matter. (shrink)

Pick's The Cabala: Its Influence on Judaism and Christianity is a wonderful brief overview of the Cabala. In it, Pick describes the origin of the Cabala, the pre-Zohar, Zohar, and post-Zohar periods, and how the Cabala relates to Judaism and Christianity. A table of contents is included for easier navigation.

Gideon Freudenthal - The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.4 661-663 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Gideon Freudenthal Tel-Aviv University Abraham P. Socher. The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii + 248. Cloth $55.00. With few philosophers are life and work (...) so intimately connected as with Salomon Maimon. Born in 1753 in Lithuania and raised in an orthodox Jewish community, Maimon "pilgrimaged" at the age of twenty-five to Berlin, the capital of the Jewish Enlightenment. After some years of education in sciences and languages, Maimon produced, in less than ten years , a series of books and papers that today make up the seven volumes of his collected works. A.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Demonizing the Queen of Sheba: Boundaries of Gender and Culture in Postbiblical Judaism and Medieval IslamTamara AlbertiniDemonizing the Queen of Sheba: Boundaries of Gender and Culture in Postbiblical Judaism and Medieval Islam. By Jacob Lassner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Pp. xv + 281.Jacob Lassner gives a fascinating account of the fate of the Queen of Sheba in both Judaism and Islam. After a careful review of (...) postbiblical Jewish and medieval Islamic sources, the author examines the ways in which Islam appropriated the biblical story of the legendary meeting between the Queen of Sheba (the koranic Bilqis) and King Solomon, and also how Islamized narratives of that same meeting found their way back into Judaism. Following the transformation of the original biblical theme, the reader is led to discover a consensus rarely reached in the history of the two religious communities. It appears that both traditions ended up agreeing that the self-confident biblical Queen of Sheba posed a challenge to the natural, that is, male-dominated, order. Instead of focusing on the Queen's political astuteness, Judaism and Islam eventually viewed her as a subtle seductress and, hence, as (morally) inferior to Solomon. Sometimes the sexual cleverness of the female biblical figure is explained by inventing her a jinn (demon) for mother. Whatever outstanding qualities are left, these can then be imputed to the Queen's superhuman origin. Lassner concludes his book with a rich appendix including valuable Jewish and Islamic source materials in English translation.One wishes Lassner had been aware of the virulent debate kindled by Sheikh Ghazali's book on The Traditions of the Prophet (Beirut, 1990) when Lassner was gathering the materials for Demonizing the Queen of Sheba. Sheikh Ghazali, one of today's leading Muslim scholars, justified female political rule on the basis of a koranic verse referring to the Queen of Sheba: "Lo! I found a woman ruling over them, and she hath been given (abundance) of all things, and hers is a mighty throne" (XXVII.23). Today, Bilqis may go through yet a new metamorphosis and help shape modern Islamic feminism. [End Page 322]Copyright © 2001 University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Engaging the Doctrine of Israel: A Christian Israelology in Dialogue with Ongoing Judaism by Matthew LeveringJustin Schembri O.P.Engaging the Doctrine of Israel: A Christian Israelology in Dialogue with Ongoing Judaism by Matthew Levering (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2021), 547 pp.Engaging the Doctrine of Israel not only presents an interesting take on an old and complex problem but also is intriguing in its basic thesis and overall development. In this (...) book, Levering attempts, and succeeds, to marry a scripturally grounded dialogue with ongoing Judaism with the necessary presuppositions of Christian dogmatics. He does so in order to understand the central realities of God's biblical people Israel and to shine a light on how these realities must inform Christian thought (3).Such a volume fills a gap in research, since Christian dogmatic studies [End Page 1437] often suffer a lack of appreciating just how important understanding "Israel's covenantal life" is for Christian doctrine (3). Thus, while Levering tells us that this book is "the dogmatic sequel" to his Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage (1), the content of the book cannot be divorced from its scriptural foundation, nor from a contemporary dialogue with Israel.After an ample introduction (1–47), Levering begins his treatment of the matter by explaining the necessary hermeneutical framework in which such an engagement can take place (48–109). This foundational chapter not only provides the grounding for the chapters that follow but also examines the pitfalls to avoid in dialoging with ongoing Israel. In particular, Levering finds a balance in the need for both Christians and Jews to retain core beliefs and a recognition that both sides have suffered from unnecessary and painful biases that have hurt dialogue in the past (52–53).Since Levering is writing from the point of view of a Christian, he is right to point out that a healthy and fruitful dialogue with Judaism in the present moment requires both a solid foundation in Christian doctrine and an acknowledgement of how the New Testament has been misused to reject and subject the Jewish people to injustice over the centuries. Thus, in agreement with the author, I too think that Christian–Jewish dialogue plays a vital role not only in healing such biases but also in bridging needless gaps between the two groups (108–109).This crucial chapter is followed by an examination of six different areas (110–443) in which Levering engages with Israel's doctrine through a Christian lens. In each case, a similar format is found in the sense that Levering first introduces the topic and then engages with different Jewish and Christian scholars in order to elicit a more robust space for dialogue to happen. Each topic of study, then, is brought to a conclusion wherein Levering explicates both the pitfalls to be avoided and what truth can Christians glean.The first area to be discussed is creation (110–46). In this chapter, Levering examines why is it important for both Jews and Christians alike to affirm that omnipotent God created creation ex nihilo. The author is right to point out that if God did not create creation out of nothing, then God is not omnipotent but rather merely a "powerful finite being" (111).While I would have like to see a more robust exegetical analysis on Gen 1:1–2 (especially with regards to bǝrē'šît, since it is not so certain that this prepositional phrase should be interpreted temporally), the author is right to move beyond the metaphysical question of creation ex nihilo, to point out that creation is "also rooted in God's speaking, and thus his Word," since creation must be understood as the way in which God establishes "a dialogic communion" (124) with creation. After all, it is the Word which is [End Page 1438] fundamental; God speaks and practically invites creation to take its place amongst the grooves that God has made.What is more is that this Word, as Levering acknowledges, is both divine and human, since it is the Word of God written in human language. Thus, in Scripture, we cannot escape the "divine–human collaboration" (145) that is willed by... (shrink)

Scholarly and well-balanced; it breathes a conviction that, underlying the initial divergencies in the Jewish philosophical and theological tradition, there is a unity in the direction of inquiry and content that is not merely man-made. The richness of the Jewish philosophical tradition could hardly have been more adequately presented in one volume. The only complaint is that sufficient mention is not made of the Jewish philosophers and philosophies of the Kabbala, possibly because of the author's conviction that such was not (...) truly philosophy and only dubiously religion.—E. A. R. (shrink)

The current study investigated the influence of morphological structure on the earliest stages of Arabic reading acquisition. More specifically, we aimed at examining the role of root and pattern units in beginners from Grade 1 to 3. A first set of reading tasks evaluated the presence of a morphology facilitation effect in word and pseudoword reading by manipulating independently the familiarity of roots and patterns. The second one pursued to examine the contribution of morphological awareness to reading performance. The results (...) suggest that reading ability is early influenced by the awareness of morphological composition. Children read faster and more accurately pseudowords composed of familiar morphemes. Furthermore, regression analyses revealed, for every reading measure, a significant contribution of one morphological test in addition to grapheme knowledge. Results are discussed taking into account the differences obtained depending on lexicality and morpheme type (root or pattern). (shrink)

Based on evidence that learning new characters through handwriting leads to better recognition than learning through typing, some authors proposed that the graphic motor plans acquired through handwriting contribute to recognition. More recently two alternative explanations have been put forward. First, the advantage of handwriting could be due to the perceptual variability that it provides during learning. Second, a recent study suggests that detailed visual analysis might be the source of the advantage of handwriting over typing. Indeed, in that study, (...) handwriting and composition –a method requiring a detailed visual analysis but no specific graphomotor activity– led to equivalent recognition accuracy, both higher than typing. The aim of the present study was to assess whether the contribution of detailed visual analysis is observed in preschool children and to test the variability hypothesis. To that purpose, three groups of preschool children learned new symbols either by handwriting, typing, or composition. After learning, children performed first a four-alternative recognition task and then a categorization task. The same pattern of results as the one observed in adults emerged in the four-alternative recognition task, confirming the importance of the detailed visual analysis in letter-like shape learning. In addition, results failed to reveal any difference across learning methods in the categorization task. The latter results provide no evidence for the variability hypothesis which would predict better categorization after handwriting than after typing or composition. (shrink)

The most recent work by Jürgen Habermas tries to revalue religion in today's society. For this he tries to find genealogical connections between secular content and the worldviews that emerged in the Axial Age, including Jewish monotheism. In this article we try to propose that a genealogical approach to monotheism from the perspective of those involved would have to start from the context of undetected origin that constitutes the ethical universalism of Judaism: the Noahide code. To do this, we analyze (...) narrative and conceptual elements of axial and non-axial cultures and show their parallels with the seven laws of the children of Noah as the moral core of humanity. (shrink)

Are there parallels between the "moment of insight" in science and the emergence of the "unknowable" in religious faith? Where does scientific insight come from? Award-winning biologist Robert Pollack argues that an alliance between religious faith and science is not necessarily an argument in favor of irrationality: the two can inform each other's visions of the world. Pollack begins by reflecting on the large questions of meaning and purpose--and the difficulty of finding either in the orderly world described by the (...) data of science. He considers the obligation to find meaning and purpose despite natural selection's claim to be a complete explanation of our presence as a species--a claim that calls upon neither natural intention, nor design, nor Designer. Next, the book focuses on matters of free will, from the choice of a scientist to accept evidence, to the choice of a religious person to accept a revelation, to a patient's loss of free will in medical treatment. Here Pollack addresses questions of ethics and offers a provocative comparison of two difficult texts whose contents remain incompletely understood: the DNA "text" of the human genome and the Hebrew record of Jewish written and oral law. In closing, Pollack considers the promise of genetic medicine in enabling us to glimpse our own future and offers a reconsideration of the possible utility of the so-called placebo effect in curing illness. Whether refuting a DNA-based biological model of Judaism or discussing the Darwinian concept of the species, Pollack, under the banner of free inquiry, presents a genuine, vital, and well-argued assay of the intersection of science and religion. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to contribute to elucidate Wittgenstein’s conception of Judaism. It is generally acknowledged that Otto Weininger’s work influenced the thought of Wittgenstein, but there is no agreement on the content of that influence. Here we argue that it is perceptible not only in the wittgensteinian conception of ethics, geniality, talent, etc., but also in his characterization of Judaism and the way the philosopher uses this idea.

Against the background of quite frequent historical periods of physical imprisonment of the Jewish people, this people became the bearer of the Revelation of Truth, which led to the conscious use of freedom of choice in favor of preserving divine gnosis with further ethical direction of freedom. At this stage of the design of the Torah as a collection of sacred books, and the subsequent management of its commandments, the freedom of the individual was sacrificed to the general religious goals (...) of the community. The sacred fear of the greatness of God led to the realization of almost total predestination. The Talmudic and rabbinical currents, which initially continued to cultivate the content of freedom that began in the Torah period, later adopted the anthropocentric ideas of medieval Europe and gradually transformed their religious and cultic positions under the influence of civil liberties. so-called "modern Judaism". The common general orientation of the freedom of the Jewish people has been divided into the political and social freedoms of each individual Jew, where each is responsible for the ethical consequences of his own existence. (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)

Spinoza is often presented as an important source for Kant’s view on Judaism and the Old Testament. This claim is often made on the basis of the alleged affinity between the relevant ideas of the two thinkers. In this article, I agree with scholars who point out that Spinoza’s direct influence on Kant’s view of the Old Covenant can be doubted, and further argue that the substance of their ideas about the Hebrew Bible is fundamentally different. I discuss their views (...) on biblical hermeneutics (here showing some affinity between them), the Mosaic law (its content and divinity), and especially the significance of Judaism for Christianity, where the discrepancy between Kant and Spinoza regarding the Old Covenant becomes particularly evident. (shrink)

There is no greater testament to Emmanuel Levinas' reputation as an enigmatic thinker than in his meditations on eschatology and its relevance for contemporary thought. Levinas has come to be seen as a principal representative in Continental philosophy - alongside the likes of Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno and Zizek - of a certain philosophical messianism, differing from its religious counterpart in being formulated apparently without appeal to any dogmatic content. To date, however, Levinas' messianism has not received the same detailed attention (...) as other aspects of his wide ranging ethical vision. Terence Holden attempts to redress this imbalance, tracing the evolution of the messianic idea across Levinas' career, emphasising the transformations or indeed displacements which this idea undergoes in taking on philosophical intelligibility. He suggests that, in order to crack the enigma which this idea represents, we must consider not only the Jewish tradition from which Levinas draws inspiration, but also Nietzsche, who ostensibly would represent the greatest rival to the messianic idea in the history of philosophy, with his notion of the ‘parody' of messianism. >. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: 1. An Ethical Transcendental Philosophy 1 -- 2. Beyond Being. Ontology and Eschatology in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas 33 -- 3. The Rationality of the Philosophy of Levinas 56 -- 4. Levinas on Substitution 83 -- 5. Judaism and Hellenism in the Philosophy of Levinas and Heidegger 101 -- 6. Ontological Difference (Heidegger) and Ontological Separation (Levinas) 115 -- 7. Enmity, Friendship, Corporeality 133 -- 8. The Rationality of Transcendence 147 -- 9. Levinas on Theology (...) and the Philosophy of Religion 169. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Hypothesis Concerning the Character of Islamic ArtAsli GocerWhy Islamic art has the distinctive features it has continues to generate clashing explanations. The Islamic visual treasury has no figural images, for instance, and three-dimensional sculpture or large scale oil painting, but instead contains miniatures, vegetal ornaments, arabesque surface patterns, and complex geometrical designs. To account for the phenomena the following radically opposing theories have been offered: the influence of (...) Judaism, the Quranic prohibition against making images, 1 Islamic resentment of the glory of Byzantine icons, 2 logocentricism of classical Islam, 3 the spiritual dimension of Islam, 4 tacit Islamic assertion of “otherness,” 5 and contingency of history. 6 The merits of these theories have been roundly discussed in the literature, and so I will not repeat the task here. I will insist that none of these theories offer a coherent explanation for all arts, but my presumption is that such an explanation is possible. In nonvisual arts the Muslim prefers simple tunes over that of the symphony, for instance, whirling dervishes over the ballet, and lyric poetry over dramatic literature. In my view what explains the common characteristic of all these arts is a certain kind of Islamic attitude informed by a certain philosophical outlook. Although it would be hasty to suggest the existence of a monolithic [End Page 683] Islamic art, it would be equally rash to deny some striking commonalities among its diverse examples. 7The following observation by a Muslim scholar is notable in this regard: “Whether in the great courtyard of the Delhi Mosque or the Qarawiyyin in Fez, one feels oneself within the same artistic and spiritual universe despite all the local variations in material, structural techniques, and the like.” 8 Some cite geometry as what mediates that feeling to the observer despite the cultural divergences in style. 9 Even those who have given up the search for the universal or the spiritual in Islamic art cannot help but see in it the classical ideal of beauty. 10 It is this classical heritage that in fact holds one of the important keys to the puzzle at hand. In particular I shall claim that Islamic art is the living image of what Plato has in mind for art in a theocratic state. Clearly, to refer to Plato and art in the same breath invites trouble. As is well enough known, giving a general interpretation of Plato’s views on the nature of art is a very complex endeavor. 11 Even in the face of grave difficulties in textual exegesis, however, there is sufficient evidence that Plato has some settled views on art. Those pertinent to our discussion here involve two claims, that beauty and goodness are divine and that all human endeavor (including artistic creation) must imitate the divine. 12 Although Platonic strain in Islam has been noted in other areas, its persistent legacy has been overlooked in art. 13 I shall argue that the Platonic influence on Islamic thought can be traced not only to political philosophy 14 and geometry, 15 as it has been commonly accepted, but also aesthetics. 16 A philosophical explanation of the Islamic attitude toward art may therefore be derivable from the Platonic axiom that god is the paradigm of beauty, which is the cosmological principle of [End Page 684] order and harmony; and as all created things, art, too, must reflect the divine paradigm.Before defending this ahistorical hypothesis on the character of Islamic art so reviled in recent literature, a few caveats are in order. “Islamic art” contains redundant terms. Strictly speaking all art in Islam is “Islamic,” because for the Muslim art is a crucial point of contact with the divine. That art should direct the mind to the divine is also Plato’s view. 17 Second, the categories that have traditionally been used to describe Islamic art such as “aniconic” and “nonrepresentational” are unhelpful for the problem at hand. 18 When it comes to the issue of iconography in Islamic arts, there is no consensus, for Islamicists are notably divided on the semiotic dimension of the Islamic visual language. The question of whether the geometric surface pattern is essentially iconography, for instance, is yet... (shrink)

ABSTRACT The philosophical tradition approaches to morals have their grounds predominantly on metaphysical and theological concepts and theories. Among the traditional ethics concepts, the most prominent is the Divine Command Theory (DCT). As per the DCT, God gives moral foundations to the humankind by its creation and through Revelation. Morality and Divinity are inseparable since the most remote civilization. These concepts submerge in a theological framework and are largely accepted by most followers of the three Abrahamic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and (...) Islam: the greatest part of the human population. Holding faith and Revelation for its grounds, the Divine Command Theories are not strictly subject to the demonstration. The opponents to the Divine Command conception of morals, grounded in the impossibility of demonstration of its metaphysical and religious assumptions, have tried for many centuries (albeit unsuccessfully) to devalue its importance. They held the argument that it does not show material evidence and logical coherence and, for this reason, cannot be taken into account for scientific nor philosophical purposes. It is just a belief and, as so, should be understood. Besides these extreme oppositions, many other concepts contravene the Divine Command theories, in one or another way, in part or in full. Many philosophers and social scientists, from the classic Greek philosophy up to the present date, for instance, sustain that morality is only a construct, and thus culturally relative and culturally determined. However, this brings many other discussions and imposes the challenge to determine what is the meaning of culture, which elements of culture are morally determinant, and finally, what are the boundaries of such relativity. Moral determinists claim that everything related to human behavior, including morality, is determined, once free will does not exist. More recently, modern thinkers argued that there is a strict science of morality. However, the scientific method alone, despite explaining several facts and evidence, cannot enlighten the entire content and full meaning of ethics. Morals’ understanding requires a broader perception, and an agreement among philosophers, which they have never achieved. All of these questions have many different configurations depending on each philosophical strand, and start complex analysis and endless debates, as long as many of them are reciprocally conflictive. The universe and the atmosphere involving this thesis are the dominions of all these conceptual conflicts, observed from an objective and evolutionary standpoint. Irrespective of this circumstance and its intrinsic importance, however, these questions are far distant from the methodological approach of an analytical discussion on objective morals, what is, indeed, the aim and scope of this work. We should briefly revisit these prominent traditional theories because this thesis shelters a comparative study, and its assumptions at least differ profoundly from all traditional theories. Therefore, it becomes necessary offering direct and specific elements of comparison to the reader, for the right criticism, dispensing interruptive researches. However, even revisiting the traditional theories, for this comparative and critical exposure purpose, they will be kept by the side of our main concerns, as “aliena materia.” Irrespective of the validity of any or all of the elements of this discussion, and their meaning as the philosophical universe of this thesis, the purpose of this work is demonstrating and justifying the existence and meaning of prehistoric moral archetypes arisen directly from the very first social needs and efforts for survival. These archetypes are the definition of the essential foundation of ethics, its aggregation to the collective unconscious and corresponding logic organization and transmission to evolutionary stages of the human genome and different relations space-time, irrespective of any contemporary experience of the individuals. The system defined by these archetypes composes an evolutionary human social model. Is this a metaethical position? Yes, it is. Moreover, as in any metaethical reasoning, we should look carefully for the best and coherent routes, as the Analytical Philosophy offers them. Thus, this work should reasonably demonstrate that morals are not a cultural product of the civilized men or modern societies and that despite being subject to several cultural relative aggregations and subtractions, its essential foundations are archetypal and have never structurally changed. This reasoning induces that morality is an original attribute of the “homo sapiens”; it is not a property and nor an accident: it integrates the human essence and belongs to the realm of the ontological human identity. The human phenomena is a continuing process, playing its role between random determination and free will, and we need to question how morality began and how did it come to us in the present. (shrink)

It is the contention of this article that Proverbs chs. 1–9 is a literary unity in which wisdom has the denotation of the parental household teaching. Teachings which have other contexts in other parts of the Old Testament have in Pr. 1–9 a parental teaching context. Besides denoting the parental teaching, personified speaking Wisdom has the personal features of a teacher. Both Wisdom’s features and her message serve to reinforce the parental teaching. Personified Wisdom also denotes the teaching of the (...) entire Book of Proverbs. Through the device of personified Wisdom, the wisdom of Solomon enshrined in the Book of Proverbs is re‐located from the royal court to the individual Israelite household. This is evident in the literary design of the book. It also reflects the situation of the book’s redaction in post‐exilic Judaism. (shrink)

This book tells the story of modern ethics, namely the story of a discourse that, after the Renaissance, went through a methodological revolution giving birth to Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s new science of natural law, leaving room for two centuries of explorations of the possible developments and implications of this new paradigm, up to the crisis of the Eighties of the eighteenth century, a crisis that carried a kind of mitosis, the act of birth of both basic paradigms of the two (...) following centuries: Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. The new science of natural law carried a fresh start for ethics, resulting from a mixture of the Old and the New. It was, as suggested by Schneewind, an attempt at rescuing the content of Scholastic and Stoic doctrines on a new methodological basis. The former was the claim of existence of objective and universal moral laws; the latter was the self-aware attempt at justifying a minimal kernel of such laws facing skeptical doubt. What Bentham and Kant did was precisely carrying this strategy further on, even if restructuring it each of them around one out of two alternative basic claims. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics of the Enlightenment attacked both not on their alleged failure in carrying out their own projects, but precisely on having adopted Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s project. What counter-enlightenment has been unable to spell out is which alternative project could be carried out facing the modern condition of pluralism, while on the contrary, if we takes a closer look at developments in twentieth-century ethics or at on-going discussions on practical issues, we might feel inclined to believe that Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s project is as up-to-date as ever. -/- Table of Contents -/- Preface I. Fathers of the Reformation and Schoolmen 1.1. Luther: passive justice and the good deeds; 1.2. Calvin: voluntarism and predestination; 1.3. Baroque Scholasticism; 1.4. Casuistry and Institutiones morales -/- II Neo-Platonists, neo-Stoics, neo-Sceptics 2.1. Aristotelian, neo-Platonic, neo-Epicurean and neo-Cynic Humanists; 2.2. Oeconomica and the art of living; 2.3. Neo-Stoics; 2.4. Neo-Sceptics; 2.5. Moralistic literature -/- III Neo-Augustinians 3.l. The Jansenists on natura lapsa, sufficient grace, pure love; 3.2. Nicole on the impossibility of self-knowledge; 3.3. Nicole on self-love and charity; 3.4. Nicole against civic virtue, for Christian civility; 3.5. Malebranche on general laws and necessary evil; 3.6. Malebranche on Neo-Augustinianism and Platonism. -/- IV Grotius, Pufendorf and the new moral science 4.1. Grotius against Aristotle and the sceptics; 4.2. Mersenne and Gassendi; 4.3. Descartes on ethics as the last branch of philosophy’s tree; 4.4. Hobbes on scepticism and the new moral science; 4.5. Spinoza on the new moral science as a descriptive science;4.6. Locke on voluntarism and probabilism; 4.7. Pufendorf on natural law as an exact science; 4.8. Pufendorf on physical and moral entities; 10. Pufendorf on self-preservation -/- V The empiricist version of the new moral science: from Cumberland to Paley 5.1. Cumberland against Hobbesian voluntarism; 5.2. Cumberland and theological consequentialism; 5.3. Cumberland on universal benevolence and self-love; 5.4. Shaftesbury on the moral sense; 5.5. Hutcheson on natural law and moral faculties; 5.6. Gay, Brown, Paley and theological consequentialism. -/- VI The rationalist version of the new moral science: from Cudworth to Price 6.1. The Cambridge Platonists; 6.2. Shaftesbury on the moral sense; 6.3. Butler and a third way between voluntarism and scepticism; 6.4. Price and the rational character of moral truths; -/- VII Leibniz’s compromise between the new moral science and Aristotelianism 1.Leibniz against voluntarism; 2.Leibniz against the division between the physical and the moral good; 3.Leibniz on la place d’autrui and theological consequentialism; 4.Thomasius, Wolff, Crusius -/- VIII French eighteenth-century philosophers without the new moral science 8.1. The genealogy of our ideas of virtue and vice; 8.2. Maupertuis and moral arithmetic 8.3. The philosophes and the harmony of interests; 8.4. Rousseau on corruption, self-love, and virtue; 8.5. Sade on the merits of vice -/- IX Experimental moral science: Hume and Adam Smith 9.1. Mandeville’s paradox; 9.2. Hutcheson on the law of nature and moral faculties; 9.3. Hume on experimental moral philosophy and the intermediate principles; 9.4. Hume’s Law; 9.5. Hume on the fellow-feeling; 9.6. Hume on natural and artificial virtues and disinterested pleasure for utility; 9.7. Adam Smith’s anti-realist metaethics; 9.8. Adam Smith on self-deception and the paradox of happiness; 9.9. Adam Smith on sympathy and the impartial spectator; 9.10. Adam Smith on the twofold criterion for moral judgement and its paradox; 9.11. Reid on the refutation of scepticism and the self-evidence of duty -/- X Kantian ethics 10.1. Kantian metaethics: moral epistemology; 10.2. Kantian metaethics: moral ontology; 10.3. Kantian metaethics: moral psychology; 10.4. Kantian normative ethics; 10.5. Kant on the impracticability of applied ethics; 10.6. Kantian moral anthropology; 10.7. Civilisation and moralisation; 10.8. Theology on a moral basis and the origins of evil; 10.9. Fichte and the transformation of theoretical philosophy into practical philosophy XI Bentham and utilitarianism 11.1. Bentham’s linguistic theory; 11.2. Bentham’s moral ontology, psychology, and theory of action; 11.3. The principle of greatest happiness; 11.4. The critique of religious ethics; 11.5. The new morality; 11.6. Interest and duty; 11.7. Virtues; 11.8. Private ethics and legislation -/- XII Followers of the Enlightenment: liberal Judaism and Liberal Theology 12.1. Mendelssohn; 12.2. Salomon Maimon; 12.3. Haskalā and liberal Judaism; 12.4. Liberal Theology. -/- XIII Counter-Enlighteners 13.1.Romanticism and the fulfilment of individuality as the Summum Bonum; 13.2. Hegel on history as the making of liberty; 13.3. Hegel on the unhappy consciousness and the beautiful soul; 13.4. Hegel on Morality and Sittlichkeit; 13.5. Marx on ideology, alienation, and praxis; 13.6. Schopenhauer on compassion; 13.7. Kierkegaard on faith beyond ethics. -/- XIV Followers of the Enlightenment: intuitionists and utilitarian 14.1 Whewell‘s criticism of utilitarianism; 14.2 Whewell on morality and the philosophy of morality; 14.3 Whewell on the Supreme Norm; 14.4 Whewell on the conflict between duties; 14.5 Mill and the proof of the principle of utility; 14.6 Mill’s eudemonistic utilitarianism; 14.7 Mill on rules -/- XV Followers of the Enlightenment: neo-Kantians and positivists 15.1. French spiritualism; 15.2. Neo-Kantians: the Marburg school; 15.3. Neo-Kantians: the Marburg school; 15.4. Comte’s positivism and the invention of altruism; 15.5. Social Darwinism; 15.6. Wundt and an ethic of humankind -/- XVI Post-enlighteners: Sidgwick 16.1. Criticism of intuitionism; 16.2. On ethical egoism; 16.3. Criticism of utilitarianism -/- XVII Post-enlighteners: Durkheim 17.1. Sociology as physics of customs; 17.2. Morality as physics of customs and as practical science; 17.3. On Kantian ethics and utilitarianism; 17.4. The variability of moralities;17.5. Social solidarity as end and justification of morality; 17.6. Secular morality as “sociodicy”; XVIII Post-enlighteners: Nietzsche 18.1. On the Dionysian; 18.2. On the deconstruction of the world of values 18.3 On the twofold genealogy of moralities; 18.4. On ascetics and nihilism; 18.5. Normative ethics of self-fulfilment -/- Bibliography / Index of names / Index of concepts -/- . (shrink)

Marcel Gauchet has launched one of the most ambitious and controversial works of speculative history recently to appear, based on the contention that Christianity is "the religion of the end of religion." In The Disenchantment of the World, Gauchet reinterprets the development of the modern west, with all its political and psychological complexities, in terms of mankind's changing relation to religion. He views Western history as a movement away from religious society, beginning with prophetic Judaism, gaining tremendous momentum in Christianity, (...) and eventually leading to the rise of the political state. Gauchet's view that monotheistic religion itself was a form of social revolution is rich with implications for readers in fields across the humanities and social sciences. Life in religious society, Gauchet reminds us, involves a very different way of being than we know in our secular age: we must imagine prehistoric times where ever-present gods controlled every aspect of daily reality, and where ancestor worship grounded life's meaning in a far-off past. As prophecy-oriented religions shaped the concept of a single omnipotent God, one removed from the world and yet potentially knowable through prayer and reflection, human beings became increasingly free. Gauchet's paradoxical argument is that the development of human political and psychological autonomy must be understood against the backdrop of this double movement in religious consciousness--the growth of divine power and its increasing distance from human activity. In a fitting tribute to this passionate and brilliantly argued book, Charles Taylor offers an equally provocative foreword. Offering interpretations of key concepts proposed by Gauchet, Taylor also explores an important question: Does religion have a place in the future of Western society? The book does not close the door on religion but rather invites us to explore its socially constructive powers, which continue to shape Western politics and conceptions of the state. (shrink)

Most literature on religious beliefs and disagreements among traditions focuses on a bit of mainstream assumptions: religions should be construed in substantive terms; religions are to be individuated by their core belief systems; adherents to a single tradition assent to the same belief system; religious beliefs have factual content; incompatible religious beliefs cannot be both true; and so on. In my work I question all these claims in order to defend a non kantian approach to deep pluralism. In the first (...) part I develop a narrative theory of doxastic practices. My fundamental intuition is that ambiguity, vagueness, and indeterminacy of meaning are non amendable features of any ordinary belief. Consequently, no proposition has a definite meaning, and there is no a priori reason to assume that if two believers assume the same belief, they both hold the same content. What I'm trying to do is to argue in support of a realist epistemology, without assuming a normative and rationalist stance. My evidential body is mainly drawn from psychology and psychoanalysis. In the second part I apply such a narrative theory to the study of the doxastic character of religions. I reject both functionalist and substantive approaches to religion, and I defend my own viewpoint which I label experentialism. After providing a characterization of religious beliefs, I refute how Alston, Ward and Hick account for the the doxastic features of religions. I then propose a definition of religious diversity which turns out to be alternative to the mainstream one. I work by empirical evidence from semiotics, sociology of religion and history of religions. In the third and conclusive part of my book, I give reasons against the mainstream approach to religious diversity, and I explain how my definition can be more appropriate to the sociological study of religious beliefs than the mainstream one. Finally, I provide an account of deep pluralism, I show that my approach to religious epistemology and religions is compatible with (and recommended by) deep pluralism, I differentiate kantian from non kantian pluralism, and I explain why non kantian deep pluralism resists the traditional objections to pluralism. Throughout the book I discuss relevant materials from Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. (shrink)

If, in content and in method, philosophy and religion conflict, can there be a Jewish philosophy? What makes a Jewish thinker a philosopher? Emil L. Fackenheim confronts these questions in a profound and insightful series of essays on the great Jewish thinkers from Maimonides through Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Leo Strauss. Fackenheim also contemplates the task of Jewish philosophy after the Holocaust. While providing access to key Jewish thinkers of the past, this volume highlights the exciting achievements (...) of one of today's most creative and most important Jewish philosophers. (shrink)

A collection of articles, some of which appeared previously. Partial contents:.

This article evaluates the significance of the personal liberation that Santayana offers in relation to previous proposals in Western modern philosophy. These include the ideas of liberation present in the philosophies of Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. I argue that Santayana endorses Spinoza’s project, as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche did, of a philosophic redemption as an alternative to an established religion. Yet, he also follows Schopenhauer in rectifying Spinoza’s attempt of recapturing the philosophic truth of Christianity, a project undertaken in Medieval times (...) for Judaism and Islam, but not for Christianity. The result is an explicit philosophic reconstruction of the esoteric truth of Christianity. This, I argue, is the content of the lay religion and the deliverance it provides that Santayana sees as genuine philosophy and that is exemplified by the work of his hero and master, Spinoza. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Levinas—Between Philosophy and Rhetoric:The “Teaching” of Levinas’s Scriptural ReferencesClaire Elise KatzIn an interview titled "On Jewish Philosophy," Emmanuel Levinas illuminates the connection that he sees between philosophical discourse and the role of midrash in interpreting the Hebrew scriptures. His interviewer immediately expresses surprise at Levinas's comments that suggested he saw the traditions of philosophy and biblical theology as in some sense harmonious (quoted in Robbins 2001, 239). Levinas responds (...) by elaborating on this connection he sees. For him, the lived experience of Judaism is above all a sense of belonging to humanity and, in turn, to a supreme order of responsibility (240). Although his intellectual life focused on the sacred texts of Judaism, this life included non-Jewish books, which he believed expressed a similar concern or a similar responsibility—a concern for the meaning of life. This list of such books includes Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, The Miser, and The Misanthrope, in addition to the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.In Levinas's view, these novels are not exercises of philosophyper se; as mentioned above, they express the same concerns that occupy philosophy, but they express these concerns in a different idiom. They do not offer a philosophical argument; instead, they use figurative language and literary narrative to convey their messages. By drawing this distinction between philosophy and literature, Levinas appears to have divided the written word into two categories: philosophy, on the one hand, and literary texts, on the other. Yet readers of his philosophical work cannot help but notice his frequent references to literary sources, including the numerous citations taken from the Jewish holy texts. His use of these citations encourages us to ask how we are to classify these books in general and how to classify, in particular, the Scriptures and the holy texts in Judaism. With regard to the holy texts in Judaism, should we classify them as simply a [End Page 159] literary device? Or, do they constitute a third category that falls somewhere in between philosophy and rhetoric? If the latter, then what is their status relative to these larger categories?Although Levinas insists on separating his two bodies of work—his philosophical writings and his Jewish writings—the distinction between them becomes increasingly blurred with his frequent introduction of citations from the Hebrew texts into his philosophy and by inflecting his Jewish writings with philosophical interpretations.1 In what follows, I examine the unique and significant role of Scriptural references within Levinas's philosophical work. My claim is that the Scriptural references are in fact rhetorical, but not "simply" rhetorical; they do pedagogical work for Levinas that other literary devices cannot accomplish. They engage his readers such that they are invited to grapple with the Scriptures in a manner potentially unfamiliar to them, and this invitation, in turn, has the pedagogical effect of attuning his readers to his texts and to his ethical project—even, one might say, to the other—and inviting them into an experience of transcendence.In the interview mentioned above, Levinas tells his interlocutor that for the Jews the Scriptures do not exist apart from the interpretations that accompany them. These interpretations are found in the collections of midrashim and the Talmud. One need know only a little bit about Hebrew and the construction of the Hebrew texts in order to see why these interpretations are significant. There are three grammatical concerns with the Hebrew language: first, biblical Hebrew does not contain vowels, though it does employ vowel aspirations; second, it is a language based on root letter combinations, and the meaning of these combinations alters, depending on the vowel aspirations that are inserted. For example, "Kiddish," the Hebrew blessing over wine, is based on a combination of Hebrew letters that are transliterated into English as KDSH. The blessing changes if we insert different vowel aspirations: "Kaddish" is the blessing said for those who have died. Third, biblical Hebrew lacks punctuation. Owing to the absence of vowels and punctuation, interpretation difficulties immediately emerge. The rabbinic model of midrash addresses these problems by offering multiple explanations and interpretations.Levinas, however, is not concerned with this aspect of the written language. Rather, he emphasizes... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 24-42 [Access article in PDF] Emmanuel Levinas and Iris Murdoch: Ethics as Exit? C. Fred Alford THE LEVINAS EFFECT it has been called, the ability of Emmanuel Levinas's texts to say anything the reader wants to hear, so that Levinas becomes a deconstructionist, theologian, proto-feminist, or even the reconciler of postmodern ethics and rabbinic Judaism. Talmudic scholar and postmodern philosopher, Levinas has become everything (...) to everyone. Abstract and evocative, writing in what can only be described as the language of prophecy, we pretend we understand what he is talking about, writing in much the same style, so as to say whatever we wanted to say in the first place. Even those who disagree with Levinas generally criticize him from within the framework of his project, sharing his assumptions while trying to make Levinas more Levinassian. 1How might one disrupt the Levinas Effect? By disrupt, I mean criticize Levinas sympathetically, from a perspective outside his "system," but not outside his world. Levinas's world is one in which the self is the enemy not only of the other, but of authentic existence. Iris Murdoch shares this view with Levinas. Like Levinas, Murdoch sees the self as the enemy. "Unselfing," as she calls it, is the means; the end is to overcome totality, which means the subjection of the other to my categories and my experience. Levinas means much the same thing by totality. It is his philosophical idée maîtresse, the troubling tendency of Western thought from Plato to Hegel and beyond."What breaks the drive of consciousness to totality is not an appeal to an abstract social or linguistic whole, but an encounter with the concrete other person." Levinas did not say this, nor did Iris Murdoch. Maria Antonaccio says it in a book about Murdoch, in which she compares Murdoch's views to those of Levinas. What they share, says [End Page 24] Antonaccio, is this critique of totality, even if "Murdoch would reject the language of command, lordship and accusation that pervade Levinas's account." 2Certainly Levinas's language of persecution is one of the most striking aspects of his account, and I will not ignore it. But it is not the most important thing that distinguishes him from Murdoch. One might argue that it is the "concrete other person" that distinguishes Levinas from Murdoch, for in many respects the other is an abstraction for Levinas. "The best way of encountering the Other is not even to notice the color of his eyes!" says Levinas. 3 Only at a distance is the other abstract enough to remind us of infinity.This distinction comes closer to capturing the difference between them. Even more important, Levinas shares Sartre's nausea at the thingyness of the world. Levinas calls it the il y a, the "there is." It is this that makes his account closer to Sartre's than one might imagine, and more distant from Murdoch. This does not, of course, make Levinas wrong. The comparison with Murdoch is a way of getting out from under the Levinas Effect.My goal is to better understand Levinas by comparing him with Murdoch. This requires that Murdoch's philosophy be seriously considered, but perhaps not as seriously as that of Levinas. Murdoch is the other, Levinas the subject. Possibly we will end up understanding the other better than the subject. I The outlines of Levinas's philosophy will be familiar to many readers. I will elaborate upon a story told by Levinas to recount it. 4 Imagine that someone rings your doorbell and disturbs your work. As you walk to the door you are distracted, still thinking about your latest project. It takes you a moment to recognize your neighbor at the door, the one who lives upstairs; as soon as you recognize his face you invite him in. You talk for a while. He tells you his problem, you tell him what you might do to help him. You share some pleasant conversation, and soon enough your neighbor leaves. What you originally experienced... (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Why People Matter: A Christian Engagement with Rival Views of Human Significance ed. by John F. KilnerLaura AlexanderWhy People Matter: A Christian Engagement with Rival Views of Human Significance Edited by John F. Kilner grand rapids, mi: baker academic, 2017. 240 pp. $26.99Although Why People Matter does not use the word, it is an apologetic for the Christian faith and ethical tradition. Its argument begins with a moral (...) intuition that the authors take to be near universal: "people matter." If Christian theological and ethical thought can be shown to explain and shore up the notion that [End Page 190] "people matter" better than other ethical outlooks—and the authors believe it can—then the work will have (1) established a proper moral foundation for holding and acting on the conviction that people matter and (2) provided a reasoned argument for why Christianity as a fundamental belief system is better and truer than the other ethical systems examined.The text of Why People Matter is accessible and well written. The essays weave together coherently around two central ideas: each human person has inherent, inalienable dignity, and Christianity is the truest way of understanding and acting on that conviction. To demonstrate what Christianity has to offer, the book begins (after a summative introduction by Kilner) with a set of essays describing five ethical outlooks: utilitarianism, collectivism, individualism, naturalism, and transhumanism. In each, a different author lays out an ethical foundation and concept of the outlook, shows how the concept illuminates why "people matter," explains why it may seem compelling, and argues that it fails to grasp something crucial about why people matter and how to live as if they matter. As Kilner puts it, "each [outlook] recognizes and champions something important that is missing in other ways of thinking. However, each is dangerously reductionistic by making that missing element the all-encompassing focus of its approach" (190).Next, Kilner examines the Christian conviction that every human being is made in the image of God. He argues that this conviction, rightly understood, provides the only adequate foundation for the idea that "people matter." Respect for the image of God leads to proper respect for the human rights of others. Following this, David Gushee analyzes biblical passages and themes to argue that encounters with human beings are always also encounters with God; thus, we must treat people accordingly.Why People Matter accomplishes its purpose as an apologetic, and it seems especially likely to help committed Christians understand how their moral convictions can hold up in debates with common Western philosophical ethical outlooks. A wise friend once described C. S. Lewis (referenced several times in the work) as "a master of convincing Christians that what they already believe is true." That sort of persuasion is one of the appropriate goals of apologetic, and Why People Matter seems likely to achieve it.I have two comments on areas where readers may come away unsatisfied. First, the contributors' descriptions of the ethical outlooks they discuss are necessarily brief; those who hold these outlooks would likely wish to quibble with or nuance their arguments. Second, the work addresses only Western philosophical outlooks; the authors do not engage non-Christian religious traditions. In the spirit of interreligious cooperation, this is an excellent decision: frankly, I would not want to read a work that spent several chapters explaining why Christian ethical thought is superior to the ethical thought of, say, Hinduism or Judaism. But the work does leave unanswered, and unasked, the question [End Page 191] of whether a reader who does come to reject individualism, transhumanism, and so on might not just as well embrace Islam or Buddhism as Christianity.That said, this is an engaging work on the title question. It traces the basic contours of certain ethical outlooks, shows their strengths and potential weaknesses, and argues for a deep understanding, based in Christian Scripture and ethical thinking, of why people matter.Laura AlexanderUniversity of Nebraska at OmahaCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Purity and Pollution: Resisting the Rehabilitation of a VirtueAmy Mullin“Purity” is a term used infrequently in contemporary academic literature. A survey of periodical indexes for the past ten years shows that references to purity occur predominantly in metallurgy. Purity is an increasingly important topic in anthropology, religious studies, and history, but it is a decidedly rare concern in philosophy. In my most recent search I found three references.Yet “purity” (...) was once a recurrent term in the philosophical tradition ranging from Plato through Augustine and Kant to Kierkegaard. Today when we encounter the many references to purity in the history of philosophy we too often filter them out. We assume either that “pure” is a generic term for good, or, in what seems a more knowing and sophisticated response, we read “pure” as a code term for chastity or sexual morality, the elimination, suppression or control of sexual desire. In both cases purity is written off either as a generic or as an old fashioned and rather embarrassing virtue. Hence it seems there is little reason for contemporary philosophical investigation into the rhetorical use of the language of purity and pollution.Three assumptions account for the lack of contemporary philosophical interest in the topic. First, it is assumed that purity is no longer a concern in twentieth-century philosophy. Second, purity in historical discourse is considered to be limited to a prudish or downright misogynist hostility to sex. Third and finally, it is assumed that the work historians and anthropologists have done recently into connections between purity beliefs and practices and social cohesion is irrelevant for philosophy. This is because purity in philosophy is supposed to be a resolutely individualist virtue, having little or nothing to do with unified and coherent communities.There are elements of truth to all three beliefs, but they also contain important distortions of the truth. As regards the first assumption, purity remains a concern in contemporary aesthetics, where it often means roughly something like a priori and apolitical; but I am interested in whether the concern with purity has survived in philosophies with ethical implications. [End Page 509] Here it is my contention that authenticity is the twentieth-century descendant of the virtue of purity.Second, there is much more to the rhetoric and practices of purity than concern with the sexual dimension of life, though this is a key aspect of most, and the beliefs and practices are often misogynist. There have been numerous anthropological documentations of ways in which purity beliefs, particularly an emphasis on sexual purity, are used to control women. Santi Rozario’s work, for instance, makes this point in her analysis of contemporary Bengali village life. 1 The connection between the language of purity and the practice of female circumcision, which I will not discuss in this paper, is in itself evidence enough of connections between purity beliefs and practices harmful to women. 2 However, I hope to show that there is more to purity than misogyny. Purity most basically is about order, both social and personal. 3My response to the second assumption, that purity masks an obsession with sexual control, indicates the source of my disagreement with the third, the contention that purity in philosophy is exclusively an individual virtue. Communal beliefs and practices associated with the language of purity and pollution are relevant to the philosophical treatment of purity because of the presence in both the practices and the philosophies of an interplay between social and personal order. As a result I believe an understanding of the dynamics of beliefs about purity in social practice can inform a philosophical concern with purity.First I investigate shifts in beliefs and practices concerning purity and pollution. I will concentrate on three models: ancient Greek (from the eighth to the third century BC), biblical to Talmudic Judaism (from the third century BC to the third century AD), and early Christian (from the first to the fifth century AD). These represent three traditions which have played a very significant role in shaping western civilization, theology, and philosophy. 4 They were also frequently interrelated in this period, as Christian and Jewish Platonists writing in Greek attest and of course as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Love of Country and Love of God: The Political Uses of Religion in MachiavelliBenedetto Fontana*This paper will discuss the place of religion in Machiavelli’s thought. 1 The traditional and generally accepted interpretation presents Machiavelli’s religion as a belief system whose value is determined by its functional utility to the state. In this he is said to resemble Cicero, 2 Montesquieu, 3 and Tocqueville, 4 among others. This view is (...) based on the proposition—one that is now fundamental to a modern understanding of Machiavelli—that his political theory develops a politics without moral, theological, and religious foundations (what Benedetto Croce 5 calls the “autonomy of politics” and Sheldon Wolin 6 the “autonomy of political theory”). Students of Machiavelli who ascribe to him an instrumentalist theory of religion rest their interpretation on this conception of politics: a distinction is established between religion viewed as religio, and religion conceived as fides, where the former is used to develop and cement social bonds and the latter is a faith based on a transcendent “truth.”A reading of the texts shows that Machiavelli discusses various kinds of religion. He refers, for example, to multiple forms of Christianity, such as “primitive” [End Page 639] or original Christianity, 7 official, medieval Christianity, the ecclesiastical principality of the papacy, as well as to ancient Judaism, 8 paganism, and to Islam. 9 However, it is possible to discern in Machiavelli two principal or distinctive types. One is based on the opposition Machiavelli sees between the religion of the Romans (which instills virtù) and the religion of the post-classical and post-Roman Christian world (which teaches humility and passivity). The other is prophetic religion, in which Machiavelli contrasts the prophet armed to the prophet unarmed. Thus, we have prophetic religion and non-prophetic religion; the former is either armed or unarmed, and the latter is either immanent (natural) or transcendent. 10Machiavelli’s stress on the importance of virtù (whether of the prince or of the people) suggests that religion is not simply religio—that is, a political technique to rule and to control the masses. Rather, it presupposes a concern for a moral fides which, though certainly not transcendent, is nevertheless necessary to the construction of a political order based on virtù. His concern with civil and military virtue links the armed prophetic religion with that of the ancient Romans, such that ancient Judaism, Islam, and a reformed Christianity (a kind of Lutheranism ante litteram) all stand opposed to primitive and post-classical Christianity.Machiavelli anticipates in theory the national, anti-papal, and anti-imperial movements that were later realized in history by the Lutheran and Calvinist Reformations. He attempts to infuse the corrupt and decadent Christian conception of the world with a new, innovating spirit, one opposed to the prevailing medieval and scholastic conception of the world. In the past Christian philosophers and thinkers revised the classical notions of virtus and arete, transforming them into Christian concepts of value. Machiavelli attempts a similar “transvaluation of values” (Nietzsche), but for different ends and in a different direction: he reinterprets the Christian religion in order to assimilate it into his conception of virtù and his vision of a vivere civile.In the first part of this paper the relation Machiavelli establishes between “speaking with God” and the founding and/or reforming of states is explored. Parallels between Christian and pre-Christian (pagan and biblical) rulers reveal a basic ambiguity in Machiavelli’s belief that religion—that is, the claim of having spoken with God—is necessary to effective rule. In the second part [End Page 640] Machiavelli’s teaching (“new ways and methods”) is compared to Christ’s message of the “good news.” The contrast between the two is presented in terms of an opposition between different “ways of living,” each with its specific moral claims and political consequences. The opposition is not, the section argues, between logos and kratos, ethos and kratos, but rather between diverse ways of understanding logos and ethos. The final section argues that Machiavelli uses biblical, pagan, and Christian forms of religious symbols and metaphors in order to reevaluate the concepts of patria and amore. In so doing... (shrink)