Wide-ranging and astutely argued, Talmud /and/ Philosophy examines the intersections, partitions, and mutual illuminations and problematizations of western philosophy and the Talmud. Among its devoted students or "learners," the Talmud - both as text and mode of thought - is a constantly unfolding truth about humans in their relationship to God in the world. Among many philosophers, the Talmud has been at best an idealized and remote object, and at worse, if noticed at all, an object for curiosity. The contributors (...) to this volume collectively turn on and probe a new mode of inquiry by approaching the very question of partitions, conjunctions and disjunctions between the Talmud and philosophy as the guiding question of their inquiry. Rather than using the Talmud and its modes of argumentation to develop existing philosophical themes, the essays probe the question of how the Talmud as an intellectual discipline sheds new light on the unfolding of philosophy in the history of thought. (shrink)

The trilingual author Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky is widely known as a literary modernist and a rebel against Jewish socio-religious conventions. Yet he also developed an original dialectical way of thinking about Jewish tradition. Berdichevsky’s theory of tradition is partly elaborated in his undeservedly obscure Yiddish stories. In order to reconstruct this theory, we undertake a typology and thematic analysis of their signature literary trope: the unrealized wedding.

Abstract This paper proposes a new phenomenological approach to social history by clarifying, critiquing and developing key insights from Husserl’s late work. First, it clarifies how Husserl began to refute phenomenology’s so-called solipsism and ahistoricality by advancing a concept of history that integrates subjective, intersubjective and communal organizations of experience. This concept, his “history of presence”, can be called a “temporal mode of oriented constitution”. Its value is to show how a single recursive series of determinations organizes a diverse set (...) of epistemic norms, personal memories, and intersubjective apperceptions. As we analyze each moment of this series, the history of presence emerges as highly relevant to social inquiry, inasmuch as it highlights the roles of intersubjective awareness and shared “world-time”. Second, however, the paper shows that Husserl grounded his history, not in this self-other-world triad, but in metaphysical foundations. By falling back on an atemporal principle of identity, Husserl’s thirst for Cartesian certainty obscured some of his insights. To develop these, the paper concludes with a new look at Les maîtres fous, a famous and controversial ethnographic film by Jean Rouch. Much of Rouch’s film echoes Husserl’s own problems, but Rouch’s use of montage replaces metaphysics with rhythm, identity with alterity, hegemony with mimicry, harmonious perception with dissonant yet generative apperception. Thus, Rouch dramatizes Husserl’s relevance to the phenomenology of social history. This paper’s internal critique and cross-cultural juxtaposition of Husserl’s late work portrays such relevance more accurately than Derrida’s uncharitable “metaphysics of presence” critique. (shrink)