The discipline of philosophy and the invention of modern Jewish thought / Willi Goetschel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Goetschel, Willi, 1958-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Jewish philosophy--History.

Jewish philosophy.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (280 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Exploring the subject of Jewish philosophy as a controversial construction site of the project of modernity, this book examines the implications of the different and often conflicting notions that drive the debate on the question of what Jewish philosophy is or could be. The idea of Jewish philosophy begs the question of philosophy as such. But “Jewish philosophy” does not just reflect what “philosophy” lacks. Rather, it challenges the project of philosophy itself. Examining the thought of Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Hermann Cohen Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Margarete Susman, Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, and others, the book highlights how the most philosophic moments of their works are those in which specific concerns of their “Jewish questions” inform the rethinking of philosophy’s disciplinarity in principal terms. The long overdue recognition of the modernity that informs the critical trajectories of Jewish philosophers from Spinoza and Mendelssohn to the present emancipates not just “Jewish philosophy” from an infelicitous pigeonhole these philosophers so pointedly sought to reject but, more important, emancipates philosophy from its false claims to universalism.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Disciplining Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought

2. Hellenes, Nazarenes, and Other Jews: Heine the Fool

3. Jewish Philosophy? The Discourse of a Project

4. Inside/Outside the University: Philosophy as Way and Problem in Cohen, Buber, and Rosenzweig

5. A House of One’s Own? University, Particularity, and the Jewish House of Learning

6. Jewish Thought in the Wake of Auschwitz: Margarete Susman’s The Book of Job and the Destiny of the Jewish People

7. Contradiction Set Free: Hermann Levin Goldschmidt’s Philosophy out of the Sources of Judaism

8. Spinoza’s Smart Worm and the Interplay of Ethics, Politics, and Interpretation

9. Jewish Philosophers and the Enlightenment

10. State, Sovereignty, and the Outside Within: Mendelssohn’s View from the “Jewish Colony”

11. Mendelssohn and the State

12. “An Experiment of How Coincidence May Produce Unanimity of Thoughts”: Enlightenment Trajectories in Kant and Mendelssohn

Coda

Notes

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

0-8232-6621-4

0-8232-5251-5

0-8232-5029-6

OCLC:

821265721