While committed to the argumentative and reasoned discourse recognizable in the work of contemporary professional philosophers, the actual practice that both Socrates and Diogenes routinely engaged in was in many ways more similar to stand-up and other forms of contemporary performative comedy. This paper analyzes the commonalities between Socrates’s and Diogenes's public philosophizing in Ancient Greece and performative comedy in the contemporary world, and emphasizes the subversive rhetorical efficiency and skeptical significance of public irony for their audiences. The paper begins (...) by exploring the ways in which ancient philosophers relied on irony and humor to promote skepticism and critical thinking, analyzes contemporary comic performances that seem similar, and concludes with reflections on the varieties of philosophical activity and experience. (shrink)

In his Jerusalem, Moses Mendelssohn describes a Polynesian visitor to Dessau before traveling to India by way of ancient Jerusalem. In two pages, Mendelssohn has crossed the world, doing so to argue that in spite of their cultural differences, most human beings ultimately share basic salvific religious truths. This paper explores the religious universalism reflected in this striking passage, analyzes Mendelssohn’s cultural sensitivity and pluralism, and offers a characterization of the particularities of Mendelssohn’s Jewish universalism as well as concluding thoughts (...) on the varieties of universalism more generally. (shrink)

Any version of universalism, pluralistic sensitivities, and post-colonial awareness would need to balance a universalistic perspective with the richness of human diversity. Modern Jewish philosophers who partook in the Enlightenment's universalistic vision and maintained their distinct identity are relevant for current thinking about the balance between universalism and diversity.

ABSTRACTThis paper explores similarities between the sacrilegious revaluations Nietzsche and Spinoza undertook with regards to Christianity and Judaism respectively. In both cases, these revaluations involve a devaluation of an ancestral religious tradition, followed by the infusion of alternative values posited through forms of secular salvation linked to immanent conceptions of eternity. Given the importance of the structural and phenomenological similarities the paper analyses, it is argued that if Nietzsche thought of himself as the Anti-Christ, there is a convincing case to (...) think of Spinoza as the Anti-Moses. And because both the Anti-Christ and the Anti-Moses not only devaluated their respective religious traditions, but also suggested forms of beatitude based on a valorizing notion of eternity, their efforts are profoundly religious. Accordingly, Nietzsche and Spinoza are not only arguably the greatest Christian and Jewish heretics, but also the prophets of innovative forms of secular and immanent... (shrink)