Based on historical comparisons among master-pupil chains and other aspects of social networks among philosophers, some prmciples are suggested regarding long-term intellectual change. The higher the eminence ofphilosophers, the more tightly they are connected to mtergenerational chains of other eminent philosophers, and to horizontal circles of the intellectual community. Intellectual creativity proceeds through the contemporaneous development of rival positions, dividing up the available attention space in the intellectual community. Strong thought-communities, those that have strong external support for their institutional base, (...) subdivide to maximize internal distinctiveness; weakly supported thought-communities disappear or amalgamate by syncretism. External conditions thus affect the content of ideas indirectly by affecting the space available in the mternal field of the intellectual community. The content of philosophies, the degree of abstraction and self-conscious reflection upon intellectual operations, depends on how many generations intellectual networks maintain continuity under conditions of creative rivalry. New positions are produced by competitive appropriation of prior ideas and by negation of preexisting positions along the lines of greatest organizational rivalry. (shrink)

The disciplines of western philosophy and theology are linked by their development of concepts of the ‘other’, figured as what lies outside the ‘discourses of man. The relations between the two discourses of the other deserves the attention of feminists, given their ongoing debate of Simone de Beauvoir s claim that woman is the ‘absolute other in these discourses. While the theology of God s otherness responds to the particularity which is God, the logic that underlies this theology is of (...) general application, and so may be borrowed to theorize the anomalous status of other figures of the other. French philosopher Luce Irigaray, for example, exploits the relations between philosophy and theology in claiming that the other may be represented as at once feminine and divine. (shrink)

The paper discusses the use of Arabic script in Judeo-Arabic texts ca 900–1200. The point of departure is the observation that the use of the script for Arabic in the Islamic world was more or less determined by the religion of the writer. Arabic script was thus mainly used by Muslims. The Syrian Christians used Syriac script, while the Jews used Hebrew script. They even transliterated a great number of Arabic works into Hebrew script to make them available for Jewish (...) readers. The use of Arabic script among Jews writing for Jews is thus always noteworthy. Taken together the examples mirror the close relations with contemporary Arab culture among many groups within the Jewish community. (shrink)

The essay offers a Jewish account of education in nonviolence by examining the first of Emmanuel Levinas' Talmudic readings ‘Toward the Other.’ I begin by exploring Levinas' unique philosophy of religious education, which nurtures responsibility for the other, as part of an alternative to enlightenment-orientated modern Jewish thought pioneered by the likes of Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig. I then consider a question raised by Yusef Waghid and Zehavit Gross at the 2012 meeting of the Philosophy of Education (...) Society of Great Britain in Oxford concerning whether one must forget in order to forgive great wrong doing such as South African Apartheid or the Holocaust of European Jewry. Through an examination of Levinas' treatment of several Talmudic passages, I argue that the Jewish tradition takes a paradoxical approach to this question. We should forget in order to remember wrong doing. The spiritual process that both perpetrators and victims must undergo in order to embrace this paradox, I contend, is a genuine education in nonviolence. (shrink)

In this paper I look at a specific Hebrew religious term, Tikkun Olam, to examine the manner in which it signifies differently in two specific cases. While we understand that meaning is carried in both denotation and connotation, and while a genealogy of meaning is often useful to understand the manner in which meaning has changed across time, this paper recounts the manner in which a single word may signify differently synchronically, at a single point in history.

Chaim Potok’s novel My Name is Asher Lev tells the story about the artistically gifted Chabad-Hasidic boy Asher Lev, who is expelled from the Hasidic community he grew up in because he chose to become a painter. The story introduces several layers of conflict: between father and son&&between the individual and the loyalty to the group&&between a religious movement and Western modern society&&and finally, within the protagonist himself. I believe this last conflict, within Asher Lev himself, is the essential and (...) defining one. In this article I will examine how Asher Lev is divided between his Hasidic upbringing and the world he is introduced to through his work as a painter – a situation that creates a serious rift between Asher and his father. I furthermore intend to show, through a comparison of Marc Chagall and Asher Lev, that there is an inner connection between art and mysticism in the novel, and that Asher Lev is more faithful to the original Hasidic mysticism than his father is. Finally, I wish to show that MAL, as a novel, transcends itself. Art can be seen as analogous to religiosity and mysticism, because art and mysticism both have a transcending effect on the human mind. (shrink)

This article conceives of mystical midrash as the act of interpreting the details of a Torah verse with the purpose of entering a meditative or ecstatic state of union with God, in which the mystic by drawing down God’s insights can explain how the Torah verse mediates the micro-macrocosmic relation between God’s will and the course of history. However, since mystical midrash is such a rare phenomenon in Judaism, I have chosen to highlight the various approaches to the Torah in (...) Jewish mysticism as a background for understanding why only one of these approaches qualifies for the epithet ‘mystical midrash’. (shrink)

In this paper, we understand we advent of a ''scientific spirit'' as a revival of Gnosticism, which proclaims the superiority of man over his creator and considers knowledge to be the key to salvation. Salvation is here understood as from of ''emancipation''. Empirically, toe see our interpretation confirmed in the tremendous influence of the Corpus Hermeticum and the Lurianic Cabala on all the Renaissance scientists. In the second part of this essay, we continue a line of research inaugurated by Ferdinand (...) Christian Baur in the 19th century, and look for Gnostic outlooks in contemporary philosophy and social science. By reading Niklas Luhmann's systems theory as a modem version of Gnostic mysticism, we do not intend to dismiss the relevance of his work. For if Gnosticism defines ''modernity'', we should not be surprised to find a speculative Gnostic system among society's self-descriptions. (shrink)

I draw a phenomenological approach to religious violence by using as an example the terror apparatus called Daesh. After a brief reminder of my method, I analyze the schemas that underlie this apparatus, especially the schemas of the messiah and the Apocalypse, and the affects that the apparatus manages to capture. I show that messianic hope can be associated with hate through the figure of the anti-messiah—Christian Antichrist, the Dajjal of Muslims—which allows messianism to be tied to the schema of (...) the “evil conspiracy.” I finally suggest that it is possible to understand messianism differently by dissociating it from these other schemas. (shrink)

The concept of continuous creation is now widely used in the context of reflections on the dialogue between science and religion. The first part of this research work seeks to understand its meaning through a twofold elaboration: (1) the historical setting of the three philosophical trends in which this concept was developed: scholastic (conservation), Cartesian (conservation through repetition of the creative act at each instant), and dynamic (interpreting the emergence of radical and contingent novelty in nature as a sign of (...) the continuity of creation); (2) a philosophical and theological critique of the concept of continuous creation regarding the question of the relationship between change and creation, in the light of its highly polymorphous contemporary use, and, in opposition, its absence within the Catholic Magisterium. This work opens the field a further step toward reflection on a renewed concept of continuous creation. (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 6, June 2022.

This article is analyzing the election campaigns in Israel conducted by the Haredi parties, the Ashkenazi party United Torah Judaism. Aguat Israel and Degel ha-Torah and its Sephardic counterpart Shas. The article focuses on the authority and the blessings by various types of holy men as well as on their amulets and on the importance attributed to them in the campaigns. The campaigns to be analyzed are those conducted up to the elections from 1988 to 2003. Of special interest however (...) are the campaigns in 1996 and 1999 for the following reasons: The 1996 campaign was remarkable because the distribution of amulets by Shas was its very center, and the 1999 campaign because although amulets here played a smaller part than in 1996 other “religious effects” such as blessings by different types of holy men and use of their authority played a very prominent part in the campaigns of both Haredi parties. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the Hasidic view, namely, that human flaws do not function as a barrier between a fallen humanity and a perfect deity, since the whole of creation stems from a divine act of self-contraction. Thus, we need not be discouraged by our own shortcomings, nor by those of our loved ones. Rather, seeing our flaws in the face of another should remind us that imperfection is an aspect of the God who created us. Such a positive approach (...) to human fallibility arouses forgiveness, mutual acceptance, and a hope for repair, and, therefore, has much to recommend itself. In the first part of the paper, I argue that the notion of a perfect God derives from the Greeks rather than the Hebrew Bible. A review of classical philosophies and the idea of God’s imperfection is followed by a consideration of several Jewish attempts to resolve the dichotomy between Divine perfection and an imperfect creation. I focus on Lurianic Kabbalah, Hans Jonas, and on the Hasidic concept of "Ayin " or “nothingness” as the very source of redemption. This Hasidic idea, which was further expanded upon by the Baal Shem Tov’s students, appears in a tale recounted by his great-grandson R. Nachman of Bratslav called “The Hanging Lamp.” I focus on the tale, which illustrates the idea that knowledge of human imperfection is itself a means of perfection and redemption. (shrink)

Erich Fromm and Gershom Scholem met each other in Frankfurt in the early 1920’s. Both were young, intelligent and ambitious and would later become famous celebrities, Fromm as a psychoanalyst and social critic, Scholem as a pioneering historian of Jewish mysticism. But they did not become friends. Rather the opposite, one can say that a certain animosity arose between the two. Scholem has published nasty comments on Fromm. In one Fromm was quite unjustly called a “psychoanalytical Bolshevik”. Scholem’s claim that (...) Fromm was an enthusiastic Trotskyist is not correct either, although Fromm expressed some admiration of Trotsky as a person. Fromm, on the other hand, did not publicly comment Scholem as a person, but criticized his theories on messianism on some points. The question why the two felt an antipathy towards each other is not easy to answer. On some issues they had different views, which of course is not a sufficient reason not to be friends. The fact that they developed along contrary lines might have been of importance. And finally, some reasons for the fact that certain persons just don’t fit together are not possibly to determinate. (shrink)

The subject of this article is the anthropology of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Lyady. After an evaluation of past research into Hasidism and into Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Lyady in particular it is argued that this research possesses a rather reductionistic character. The greater part of these studies deal with either the idea of devekut introduced by Gershom Scholem as the central theme or some kind of social crisis, a line of research initiated by Simon Dubnow. Contrary to these two (...) strands the author proposes to evaluate the emergence of Hasidism as an ideological break with the past caused by the introduction of a new episteme and discourse. This idea the author tries to describe using the texts of Rabbi Shneur Zalman as an example and his understanding of man as a theme, as it is there that this new episteme is most readily illustrated. In the analysis of the central themes in the writing of Rabbi Shneur Zalman it is argued that the point of view of the individual is a major element. His understanding of the relationship between man and God, his accounting for the soul and the value of divine worship are all viewed from this perspective. In all of the central themes of Rabbi Shneur Zalman’s theosophy it is shown that man’s perspective is dominant. And this, the author argues, constitutes a break with the tradition of former Jewish mysticism. It would, however, be premature to conclude on the basis of one author that this is a major characteristic of Hasidism. Therefore, the author closes with a call for more studies into the individualism of Hasidism. (shrink)

In several passages in the tales and teachings of Rebbe Nahman of Bratslav, the divine undergoes a process of gender transformation. “The holy one blessed be he”, becomes female, and the Shekhinah temporarily takes on a male persona. Characterizations of Hasidic thought as androcentric generally apply to R’ Nahman. There is an accepted hierarchy and polarization of gender which informs much of his oeuvre. This article argues, however, that in these particular passages R’ Nahman disrupts this hierarchy. Whereas Kabbalah and (...) Hasidism normally view the feminine as an outer “garment” for the divine masculine, in these passages the devotee discovers the hidden inwardness of God, which turns out to be feminine. This radical imagery is nourishing for followers of R’ Nahman’s controversial brand of Hasidism. In particular, it provides a theological justification for their unexpectedly intimate encounters with the divine, as they engage in the meditative practice of personal, solitary prayer according to R’ Nahman’s directives. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show how early Jewish mystics made a new interpretation of the tradition, i.e. the theology of their time and by doing so, they went far off their orthodox tradition. For many years the questions of when and from where did the Merkavah mysticism develop have been a subject of discussion among researchers in Rabbinic Judaism. In the main section of the article I focus on two of the so-called makroforms, i.e. longer rather homogenous (...) passages of texts, which are Hekhalot Zutarti and Ma’aseh Merkavah. In those texts we find a lot of magical statements and if we compare this to the traditional view of God at that time, we can hardly deny that at least some of the mystics moved behind the limit of orthodoxy, or should we say, the theology of tradition. But that does not necessarily force us to give up the view that at least some of the mystics could have belonged to rabbinic circles – this is still an open question. (shrink)

The question of the right labelling of the traditions in the pseudephigraphical Hekhalot literature has often been asked among researchers in Judaism. In this article I have tried to show that ‘mysticism’ is an adequate term of these traditions. My main concern is, however, to point to an interesting problem concerning two central figures in the Merkavah mysticism, i.e. God and Metatron, the “head” of angels. Saul Lieberman has shown that the name Metatron is probably derivated from two Greek words, (...) which brings us to the supposition that there exists an extraordinary close relation between the two characters. This supposition is confirmed, when we look at some sections of the manuscripts. Metatron is often called “Little JHVH” or “Little Lord”, and in the macroform Merkavah Rabba the climax is reached by the sentence “JHVH the God of Israel, and this is Metatron”. (shrink)

Research into the so-called “philosophical” Hermetica has long been dominated by the foundational scholarship of André-Jean Festugière, who strongly emphasized their Greek and philosophical elements. Since the late 1970s, this perspective has given way to a new and more complex one, due to the work of another French scholar, Jean-Pierre Mahé, who could profit from the discovery of new textual sources, and called much more attention to the Egyptian and religious dimensions of the hermetic writings. This article addresses the question (...) of how, on these foundations, we should evaluate and understand the frequent hermetic references to profound but wholly ineffable revelatory and salvational insights received during “ecstatic” states. Festugière dismissed them as “literary fictions”, whereas Mahé took them much more seriously as possibly reflecting ritual practices that took place in hermetic communities. Based upon close reading of three central texts (CH I, CH XIII, NH VI6), and challenging existing translations and interpretations, this article argues that the authors of the hermetic corpus assumed a sequential hierarchy of “levels of knowledge”, in which the highest and most profound knowledge (gnōsis) is attained only during ecstatic or “altered” states of consciousness that transcend rationality. While the hermetic teachings have often been described as unsystematic, inconsistent, incoherent or confused, in fact they are grounded in a precise and carefully formulated doctrine of how the hermetic initiate may move from the domain of mere rational discourse to the attainment of several “trans-rational” stages of direct experiential knowledge, and thereby from the limited and temporal domain of material reality to the unlimited and eternal one of Mind. (shrink)

R. Saadia Ga'on (882–942) de Baghdad tâchait d'éviter l'anthropomorphisme en avançant que les versets bibliques qui semblent attribuer des traits matériels à Dieu portent non sur Dieu Lui-même, mais sur une entité créée, la Gloire de Dieu, que Saadia décrivait comme un “air” extrêmement subtil. Cet article s'efforce de montrer que la conception saadienne d'un air quasi divin, par lequel Dieu accomplit Ses actes dans le monde matériel, est redevable à la doctrine stoïcienne dupneuma. Il s'ensuit que la théologie immanentiste (...) desḤasidey Ashkenaz(Piétistes allemands), que l'on sait avoir été trés influencée par Saadia, est un prolongement lointain de la philosophic et de la physique stoïciennes. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s Jewish writings were central to her thinking about the human condition and engaged with the dialectics of modernity, universalism and identity. Her concept of the ‘conscious pariah’ attempted both to define a role for the public intellectual and understand the relationship between Jews and modernity. Controversially she accused Jewish victims of lack of resistance to the Nazis and argued that their victimization resulted from apolitical ‘worldlessness’. We argue that although Arendt’s analysis was original and challenging, her characterization of (...) Jewish history as one of ‘powerlessness’ is exaggerated but, more importantly, her underdeveloped concept of ‘the social’ is insensitive to the complex modalities of resistance and consciousness among subaltern Jewish communities. Furthermore, her lack of interest in religious observance obscures the importance of Judaism as a resource for resistance. This is illustrated by the ‘hidden transcripts’ of Jewish resistance from the early modern period. (shrink)

A paradox, it is claimed, is a radical form of contradiction, one that produces gaps in meaning. In order to approach this idea, two senses of “separation” are distinguished: separation by something and separation by nothing. The latter does not refer to nothing in an ordinary sense, however, since in that sense what’s intended is actually less than nothing. Numerous ordinary nothings in philosophy as well as in other fields are surveyed so as to clarify the contrast. Then follows the (...) suggestion that philosophies which one would expect to have room for paradoxes actually tend either to exclude them altogether, or to dull them. There is a clear alternative, however, one that fully recognizes paradoxes and yet also strives to overcome them. (shrink)

It is suggested that the impetus to generate models is probably the most fundamental point of connection between mysticism and psychology. In their concern with the relation between ‘unseen’ realms and the ‘seen’, mystical maps parallel cognitive models of the relation between ‘unconscious’ and ‘conscious’ processes. The map or model constitutes an explanation employing terms current within the respective canon. The case of language mysticism is examined to illustrate the premise that cognitive models may benefit from an understanding of the (...) kinds of experiences gained, and explanatory concepts advanced, within mystical traditions. Language mysticism is of particular interest on account of the central role thought to be played by language in relation to self and the individual's construction of reality. The discussion focuses on traditions of language mysticism within Judaism, in which emphasis is placed on the deconstruction of language into primary elements and the overarching significance of the divine Name. Analysis of the detailed techniques used suggests ways in which multiple associations to any given word/concept were consciously explored in an altered state. It appears that these mystics were consciously engaging with what are normally preconscious cognitive processes, whereby schematic associations to sensory images or thoughts are activated. The testimony from their writings implies that these mystics experienced distortions of the sense of self , which may suggest that, in the normal state, ‘I’ is constructed in relation to the preconscious system of associations. Moreover, an important feature of Hebrew language mysticism is its emphasis on embodiment -- specific associations were deemed to exist between the letters and each structure of the body. Implications, first, for the relationship between language and self, and, second, for the role of embodiment in relation to self are discussed. The importance of the continual emphasis on the Name of God throughout the linguistic practices may have provided a means for effectively replacing the cognitive indexing function hypothesized here to be normally played by ‘I’ with a more transpersonal cognitive index, especially in relation to memory. (shrink)