Recovering Reason: Essays in Honor of Thomas L. Pangle is a collection of essays composed by students and friends of Thomas L. Pangle to honor his seminal work and outstanding guidance in the study of political philosophy. These essays examine both Socrates' and modern political philosophers' attempts to answer the question of the right life for human beings, as those attempts are introduced and elaborated in the work of thinkers from Homer and Thucydides to Nietzsche and Charles Taylor.

Much of the writing of and about the twelfth-century rabbi, philosopher, and theologian Moses Maimonides is addressed to an elite audience of philosophers and intellectuals. Here, Ralph Lerner's exploration of Maimonides' popular writings reveals that the education of the common man was one of the great teacher's chief concerns. Lerner describes the brilliant and sometimes wily ways in which Maimonides sought to break through the despair and superstition that gripped the Jewish people's minds, without sacrificing the dignity and core of (...) his message. These writings—presented here in uncommonly accurate, mostly new translations—also reveal that Maimonides was willing to risk the scorn of his contemporaries to enlighten both his own and future generations. By addressing the writings of Maimonides' disciples, including Shem Tov ben Joseph Ibn Falaquera in the mid-thirteenth century and Joseph Albo in the fifteenth century, Lerner shows how this technique was passed on. In striking contrast to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, Maimonides' enlightenment is premised on the inequality of understandings and other differences between the elite and the common people. Instead of scorning the past, Lerner shows, Maimonides' enlightenment invests it with a new and ennobling dignity. A valuable reference for students of political philosophy and Jewish studies, Lerner's elegantly written book also brings to life the richness and relevance of medieval Jewish thought for all those interested in the Jewish tradition. (shrink)

Naive Readings is a collection of nine of Ralph Lerner s essays on an astonishing range of notoriously difficult and complex authors and texts including Benjamin Franklin s secular and his liturgical writings, Jefferson s Summary View, and Abraham Lincoln s various writings on statesmanship before he took office; Bacon s Essayes, Gibbon s writings on Jews, and Tocqueville on Edmund Burke; and finally Judah Halevi s Kuzari, and Maimonides s Guide of the Perplexed. Lerner presents his essays as experiments (...) that challenge our current habits of reading which, especially in the case of such difficult texts, usually involve a hasty dismissal of whatever is deemed irrelevant and superficial. His aim is to show that such dismissal is almost always an error fatal to gaining a better insight into an author s intent. The antidote, he argues, is to read slowly and naively, paying particular attention to passages where the prose becomes self-conscious, impassioned, and idiosyncratic. It is in these passages, Lerner claims, that we can see a pattern which once it has been discerned appears to have been laying out in plain sight all along. Lerner is especially concerned to untangle surface questions such as the unity of opening and closing, the treatment of significant but not obviously thematic subjects, the surprising choice of a foil for one s argument, and a work s structure and organization. A central issue that animates each of the essays is the question of the author s intended effect on his audiences. Ultimately the plain but barely stated message of all these heterogeneous texts is that notwithstanding our limited understanding and finite powers, we are not absolved, individually or collectively, from confronting and mitigating as best we can the difficulties and dangers that life on earth poses to our flourishing.". (shrink)

The Epistle to Yemen (composed in 1172) offers a rare opportunity to observe an individual of genuine philosophical stature engaging in popular enlightenment. As in his other works, Moses Maimonides appears here as a religious teacher, but one who goes beyond that and insists on introducing his audience to elementary notions of evidence, credibility, probability, and critical judgment.His Epistle is a decidedly political speech, both in subject matter and in manner of treatment.