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8935 results in Judaism

Page 290 of 447

  • Introduction

  • Menachem Kellner
  • Book:
    Dogma in Medieval Jewish Thought
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    06 July 2019
    Print publication:
    22 July 2004, pp 1-9

  • Summary

    Attempts formally to expound the theology of rabbinic Judaism are found for the first time in the gaonic period. Philo had listed principles of biblical faith but his discussion does not fall within our purview here for two reasons: he did not operate within the context of rabbinic Judaism as it had developed to his day and he certainly made no direct contributions to its further development.

    Once Sa'adia Gaon had for the first time methodically expounded the beliefs of Judaism in the tenth century, systematic theology became a standard and widely accepted branch of Jewish intellectual endeavour. It was not until the twelfth century, however, that we find the first comprehensive account of the dogmas of Judaism. Maimonides (1135–1204) was the first non Karaite Jewish author systematically, self-consciously, and explicitly to posit specific beliefs which all Jews qua Jews had to accept. In the two centuries following the publication of Maimonides' principles the question of the dogmas of Judaism received almost no attention. The fifteenth century saw intensive interest in the subject; with the close of that century, however, the subject disappeared almost entirely from the agenda of Jewish intellectuals, to resurface only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

    This study will examine the dogmatic systems of Maimonides and of those post-Maimonidean medieval Jewish thinkers who wrote on the subject in a sustained and orderly fashion; it will compare and contrast those systems; it will demonstrate Maimonides' all-pervasive influence; it will argue that the plethora of competing systems reflects not conflicting views of the nature of Judaism, but a dispute concerning the nature of dogmas or principles of faith; it will seek to explain why the subject was dropped after Maimonides and only picked up again after two centuries had elapsed; finally, it will suggest that the whole project of creed formulation is basically alien to biblical-rabbinic Judaism.

    Maimonides’ innovation did not occur in a vacuum. In this introduction I wish to describe briefly and generally the Muslim, Jewish, and Karaite background against which Maimonides elaborated his principles. But first it is necessary to explain, if only briefly, why systematic theology was not attempted by Jews until after the talmudic period.

  • 6 - Shalom, Arama, and Yavez

  • Menachem Kellner
  • Book:
    Dogma in Medieval Jewish Thought
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    06 July 2019
    Print publication:
    22 July 2004, pp 157-164

  • Summary

    The three figures whose writings on the principles of Judaism will be surveyed briefly in this chapter have a number of things in common. All late fifteenth-century Spanish Jews, they each composed theological works in which dogmatic questions are given fairly brief and unsystematic attention. In this they differ markedly from their contemporary countrymen, Bibago and Abravanel, each of whom devoted extensive attention to the principles of Judaism.

    Abraham Shalom

    Abraham Shalom (d. 1492) apparently lived in Catalonia. He is the author of Neveh Shalom, a work ostensibly devoted to justifying the Aggadic portions of the Talmud but which also includes a series of philosophic discussions devoted to discovering which teachings of philosophy accord with the Torah. These discussions reflect Shalom's desire to defend Maimonides from Crescas's critique that he was too radical and from Gersonides’ critique that he was too conservative.

    Shalom makes a number of passing references to beliefs which he calls variously ikkarim and yesodot. All told, the different beliefs which he mentions in this fashion are the following:

  • (1) the necessary existence of God

  • (2) reward and punishment

  • (3) divine providence

  • (4) creation of the world

  • (5) divine omnipotence

  • (6) revelation

  • (7) prophecy

  • (8) Messiah

  • (9) that God is omniscient and man has freedom

  • (10) resurrection.

    • Shalom also mentions the immutability of God and eternity of the Torah as beliefs which may be considered as principles even though he does not explicitly call them ikkarim or yesodot.

    The first four beliefs appear to be Shalom's basic list of principles. The list appears three times in the Neveh Shalom (although in the first occurrence, divine omnipotence is listed in place of providence). The other beliefs are listed in various contexts, almost haphazardly. A distinguishing feature of Shalom's account of the principles of Judaism is the heavy emphasis he places on the centrality of belief in creation. It is, he says, ‘the foundation which precedes all of the Torah, upon which the latter built its house, and upon which all its foundations stand’. This opinion concerning the importance of creation, we shall see, was shared by all of Shalom's contemporaries who dealt with the principles of Judaism.

  • 4 - Nonbeing Ensouled, Nonbeing Embodied: Levinas versus Rosenzweig on the Role of the Other in Messianic Anticipation

  • Martin Kavka, Florida State University
  • Book:
    Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy
    Published online:
    09 July 2009
    Print publication:
    10 May 2004, pp 129-192

  • Summary

    It is by now a truism that the most dramatic development in American modern Jewish thought since the 1960s, and especially since the 1990s, has been the explosion of work on the writings of Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) – the interpretive secondary works, the new translations, the scores of conference papers. Rosenzweig is an ideal standard-bearer for the task of formulating a Jewish philosophy for the postmodern era: his language evokes the texts of the Talmud, Kabbalah, and Maimonides and is ahead of its time insofar as it anticipates the rise of phenomenology in Continental philosophy as well as the linguistic turn of recent French thought and American pragmatism. The multiple “Rosenzweigs” apparent in a reading of the Star of Redemption (first published in 1921) parallel the text's multiple Judaisms: the extensive evocation of the concrete life of Jewish ritual liturgy in the third book, as well as a demythologized view of revelation and religious ethics in the second book. The Star is a book for everyone.

    Indeed, Rosenzweig may be even better suited than Levinas for the task of providing an organic Jewish philosophy. Levinas is definitely implicated in both the Jewish and postmodern worlds by virtue of his ethical critique of the totalizing humanist systems that reduce the particular to the general, and by virtue of his verifying this critique through a return to Jewish texts, both from the Talmud and from the ethico-Kabbalistic texts of the Lithuanian musar movement.

Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy
  • Martin Kavka
  • Published online:
    09 July 2009
    Print publication:
    10 May 2004
  • Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy contests the ancient opposition between Athens and Jerusalem by retrieving the concept of meontology - the doctrine of nonbeing - from the Jewish philosophical and theological tradition. For Emmanuel Levinas, as well as for Franz Rosenzweig, Hermann Cohen and Moses Maimonides, the Greek concept of nonbeing (understood as both lack and possibility) clarifies the meaning of Jewish life. These thinkers of 'Jerusalem' use 'Athens' for Jewish ends, justifying Jewish anticipation of a future messianic era as well as portraying the subjects intellectual and ethical acts as central in accomplishing redemption. This book envisions Jewish thought as an expression of the intimate relationship between Athens and Jerusalem. It also offers new readings of important figures in contemporary Continental philosophy, critiquing previous arguments about the role of lived religion in the thought of Jacques Derrida, the role of Plato in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and the centrality of ethics in the thought of Franz Rosenzweig.

  • Introduction: From Athens to Jerusalem

  • Martin Kavka, Florida State University
  • Book:
    Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy
    Published online:
    09 July 2009
    Print publication:
    10 May 2004, pp 1-17

  • Summary

    D—— and others,

    I write you anxious that these words will not be able to sustain our conversation.

    After all, this is a book about meontology, literally the study of that which is not, of nonbeing (in Greek, to mē on). “Meontology” is not exactly a word that is on the tips of people's tongues at the moment. It perhaps only calls attention to its own obscurity, evidence for yet another scholar's ignorance of the real world, of body, of skin. If so, then our conversation will fall into nothingness – an event I cannot bear to face. In resistance against this possibility, I want to state, at the outset, as simply as possible, what is at stake in thinking about meontology, so that I can hear or read your response, which I so fervently desire. I imagine you (perhaps falsely) asking four questions about what I will describe in these pages as “the Jewish meontological tradition,” and I offer four preliminary responses.

    1. What is not? Everything that has not yet actualized its potential. Most viscerally, me.

    2. What is meontology? The study of unmediated experiences of lack and privation. This study inaugurates self-critique and the realization that I live in a moment best described as not-yet. I thereby begin my path toward human perfection and toward God.

    3. How do I live in this not-yet? In manic desire for what appears to me to be stable, for what displays a comfort in its own skin that I have never experienced. For you.

  • Conclusion: Deepening the Roots of the Jewish Meontological Tradition, or contra the Derridean “Messianic”

  • Martin Kavka, Florida State University
  • Book:
    Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy
    Published online:
    09 July 2009
    Print publication:
    10 May 2004, pp 193-221

  • Summary

    Rabbi,

    In the last chapter, I extended through to Levinas a historical tradition that one could now call the “Jewish meontological tradition,” in which the analysis of nonbeing serves to ensure that Jews have not been duped by the concept of messianic anticipation. Still, there is a question that is undoubtedly on your mind: how Jewish is this? There are several reasons for you to ask this question.

    1. As I have shown in the last two chapters, for Maimonides, Cohen, and Levinas (and, to a lesser extent, Rosenzweig) the intellectually or ethically responsible individual is given redemptive power. Where is this in the texts of the tradition?

    2. You will by now have noted that I argue that the accounts of nonbeing in those thinkers who have a rich sense of Jewish life and ritual (Maimonides and Rosenzweig) are not as defensible as the accounts in those thinkers for whom Jewish praxis is not an integral part of their philosophical system (Cohen and Levinas). Therefore, it appears that any identification of a “Jewish meontological tradition” might be better described as a tradition of philosophical accounts of nonbeing that flirt with Jewish concepts.

    You have a right to be suspicious, especially of the modern thinkers I have treated. Cohen uses prophetic texts selectively insofar as they express Leibnizian or Kantian views, or adhere to his overarching narrative of historical progress. Rosenzweig uses scriptural and Kabbalistic motifs as a further application of Schelling's own earlier appropriations.

  • 3 - Nonbeing as Not-Yet-Being: Meontology in Maimonides and Hermann Cohen

  • Martin Kavka, Florida State University
  • Book:
    Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy
    Published online:
    09 July 2009
    Print publication:
    10 May 2004, pp 66-128

  • Summary

    In the previous chapter, I argued that Levinas misinterpreted the Platonic arguments he uses to justify his critical meontology; Plato cannot get past the dialectical meontology in which otherness can refer only to other objects, and not to a transcendent realm. Nevertheless, there are phenomenological arguments, notably from the third of Husserl's Logical Investigations, that can justify the Levinasian view of nonbeing as absolute otherness. These arguments, however, do not give evidence for critical meontology over and above dialectical meontology; it is not the case that Husserl proves Levinas to be true and Fackenheim to be false. Rather, they argue for a correlation of the two kinds of meontology; the two kinds of nonbeing are shown to be non-independent. The otherness beyond being announces itself in the other being that is not me.

    In this chapter, I will show that in Maimonides and Cohen, nonbeing refers to the material realm, which is deprived of a perfect form – the realm of privation is to mē on. Human existence begins in the nonbeing that is lack, and its task is to near (as fully as possible) the nonbeing that is fullness, the nonbeing above being. Given that teleology is part of the natural structure of existence, meontology opens up a realm of futurity and the process of approaching the telos is given normative value. Meontology necessitates ethics. Nevertheless, I also offer critiques of both Maimonidean and Cohenian ethics.

  • 1 - The Meontological Conundrum: Emmanuel Levinas and Emil Fackenheim on the Athens–Jerusalem Conflict

  • Martin Kavka, Florida State University
  • Book:
    Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy
    Published online:
    09 July 2009
    Print publication:
    10 May 2004, pp 18-41

  • Summary

    Any argument that meontology can resolve the conflict between Athens and Jerusalem, between reason and revelation, must naturally begin with a survey of how this conflict is currently sedimented in philosophy. For even the two serious approaches to the conflict, both of which use the term “meontology” explicitly, contradict each other. I term the first of these two approaches critical. According to this type of thinking, whose representative here is Emmanuel Levinas, the faith that defines “Jerusalem” is not only a valid approach to answering the perennial questions raised by “Athens,” it is perhaps the best approach to these questions themselves. Levinas claims that “Athens” necessarily announces a realm beyond the order of being and the rationally necessary laws that constitute it; “Athens” commands faith. Levinas therefore appears as a philosopher in the Kantian spirit. Kant offered a critical inquiry into the nature of reason, showing that the a priori principles of reason limited the “pretensions to transcendent insight” of dogmatism and speculative metaphysics, and concluded that it was “necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” While it is admittedly possible to overstate the overlap between Kant and Levinas, there is nothing that prohibits the reader from noting a family resemblance between Levinas and the Kantian methodologies. Both seek to hollow out a space within philosophy for faith through a limitation of philosophy's proper aegis.

    The other serious approach to the conflict is dialectical.

  • 2 - Beyond “Beyond Being”: Nonbeing in Plato and Husserl

  • Martin Kavka, Florida State University
  • Book:
    Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy
    Published online:
    09 July 2009
    Print publication:
    10 May 2004, pp 42-65

  • Summary

    Near the close of the sixth book of Plato's Republic (508d–509c), Socrates declares that the idea of the good is the cause of all truth and explicates this statement by drawing an analogy between the good and the sun. As the sun provides for the “coming to be, growth, and nourishment” of visible objects but is not itself any of these processes of becoming, so the good is the source of both existence and being without being either of these. Indeed, the good is defined as beyond being (epekeina tēs ousias, 509b). By stating that the good is superior to being, Plato leaves the Republic open to an interpretation that holds that discussions of the good – ethics – are superior to epistemological or metaphysical discussions. This view that “ethics is first philosophy” is perhaps the most common distillation of Levinas's thought. It appears throughout Levinas's writings, with specific reference to this section of the Republic. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas writes that “the Place of the Good above every essence is the most profound teaching – the definitive teaching – not of theology, but of philosophy” (TI 76/103). In the précis of the argument of Otherwise than Being, Levinas continues along these lines by asserting that the humanist reduction of the person to the historical fact is a forgetting of “what is better than being, that is, the Good” (AE 23/19).

    Now it is clear that Levinas is not a thoroughgoing Platonist.

Page 290 of 447