CULTURE AND LAW IN WEIMAR JEWISH MEDIEVALISM: LEO STRAUSS'S CRITIQUE OF JULIUS GUTTMANN
The German Jewish historian of political philosophy Leo Strauss is best known for mature works in which he proposed the existence of an esoteric tradition in political philosophy, attacked the liberal tradition of political thought, and defended a classical approach to natural right against its modern counterparts. This essay demonstrates that in his youth, beginning during a scholarly apprenticeship at the Berlin Akademie fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums, Strauss championed “medievals” (rather than ancients) against “moderns,” and did so through a sparring match with his postdoctoral supervisor Julius Guttmann, whom he cast in the role of representative “modern.” While for Guttmann the stakes were scholarly, for Strauss they were political. Strauss's Weimar Jewish “medievalism” was a deliberate rejection of the tradition of modern Jewish thought Strauss associated with Guttmann's teacher Hermann Cohen, whom Strauss accused of neglecting the political distinctiveness of Jewish thought. While the conflict between Strauss and Guttmann has been neglected in much of the literature on Strauss, it served as the crucible in which many of his mature views, including his famous exoteric (sometimes called “esoteric”) writing thesis, began to take shape.
Science, Finitude, and Infinity: Neo-Kantianism and the Birth of Existentialism
Selon l'A., la sensibilite particuliere d'Amos Funkenstein au lien entre la religion et la science est peut-etre ce qui caracterise le mieux sa pensee. Aussi il rend ici hommage a ce genre de recherche en abordant l'un de ses themes favoris, la theorie neo-kantienne du savoir et ses effets sur la pensee religieuse juive moderne. En unissant ces domaines distincts, il a tente de montrer comment la foi n'existe plus - si tant est qu'elle ait jamais existe - dans un confortable eloignement de la raison.
Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas
Robert Gibbs radically revises standard interpretations of the two key figures of modern Jewish philosophy: Franz Rosenzweig, author of the "Star of Redemption", and Emmanuel Levinas, a major voice in contemporary intellectual life, who has inspired such thinkers as Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray, and Blachot. Rosenzweig and Levinas thought in relation to different philosophical schools and wrote in disparate styles. Their personal relations to Judaism and to Christianity were markedly dissimilar. Finally, they were divided by history: Rosenzweig's premature death occurred before the advent of Nazism, and Levinas's life has been "dominated by the presentiment and memory of the Nazi horror". To Gibbs however, the two thinkers possess basic affinities with each other. Correlating traditional Jewish themes in social ethics with postmodern philosophy, Rosenzweig and Levinas not only discover new resonances in Jewish thought but also reorient philosophy itself, so that it takes its bearing from the individual's unavoidable responsibility for others. Levinas, who was the first expositor in France of Husserl, Heidegger, and the phenomenological method, has been read as a philosopher, with little concern for his Jewish thought, and Rosenzweig has been seen exclusively as an existentialist theologian. Gibbs maintains, on the other hand, that Rosenzweig strives to elucidate universally accessible concepts and social practices and that Levinas is a Jewish thinker in exactly the same sense. Through this argument, the book offers important insights into how philosophy is continually being altered by its encounter with other traditions.