Aryeh Botwinick

Michael Oakeshott's Skepticism

Preface and Acknowledgments xi Chapter 1: Introduction: Epistemological Backdrop 1 Chapter 2: Metaphysics 29 Chapter 3: Philosophy of Religion and Philosophy of Science 49 Chapter 4: Political Theory 117 Chapter 5: Philosophy of Conversation and Philosophy of Personal Identity 132 Chapter 6: Philosophy of Law and Philosophy of History 194 Notes 223 Index 241

Shakespeare in Advance of Hobbes: Pathways to the Modernization of the European Psyche as Charted in The Merchant of Venice

I. The Action of the Play: The Playacting Character of Human Life Antonio, the “Merchant of Venice,” in speaking to his friend Gratiano at the beginning of the play, says: “I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano: / A stage where every man must play a part, / And mine a sad one” (1.1.77–79).1 The Merchant of Venice, which is a play, is (as Shakespeare announces at the outset) about the inescapability and insurmountability of playacting as the substance of human reality. Life, as it were, is lived at one remove from itself—where our assumption…

How the Concept of Infinity Links Monotheism with Skepticism

Negative theology, which declares that we can only state what God is not but not what He is, has its devotees and practitioners in all three Western religions, who consider it to be the most sophisticated form of monotheism. Negative theology is largely derived from Platonic and Neoplatonic materials. From a Platonic perspective, later fleshed out by Aristotle, the One (what was later designated as the Western monotheistic God) emerges as a response to an antecedent question: How can we bring the explanatory quest to a halt? Where can the search for more abstract and comprehensive explanations end? Plato, in…

The Good of Liberalism: Weak Messianism

My article is devoted to doing a genealogy of weak messianism (a term that Walter Benjamin coined in relation to Marxism1) as it applies to liberal political thought and practice. The vision of a liberal political society—with a public sphere conceived as instrumental to the cultivation of “commodious living,” understood as a private sphere consisting of individual self-maximizers, bent on pursuing “power after power that ceaseth only in death”—is to a large extent a response to Hobbess theorizing of the limits to knowledge encapsulated in such areas of his thought as his nominalism and its relationship to his theory of…

Liberal Democracy, Negative Theory, and Circularity: Plato and John Rawls

In this paper, I would like to argue that the best kind of philosophical defense of democracy is one that is worked out within the framework of negative theory. In a post-metaphysical intellectual climate, negative theory enables us to theorize the best defense of democracy possible. I am using the phrase “negative theory” on analogy with the term negative theology. Just as negative theology argues that we can only indefinitely say what God is not but cannot pinpoint in a positive sense what He is, so, too, negative theory would advocate that we can only ceaselessly explore and highlight the…

Michael L. Morgan. Discovering Levinas . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xxi, 504 pp.

one’s own. The value of Cohen’s book for nonacademic readers lies in his ability to turn the most obscure (and, it must be said, at times unappetizing) halakhic problems into a platform for launching flights of literary artistry and religious insight of the most unsuspected kinds. He finds in the dankest corners of halakhic curiosity— such as the ancient notion, adopted by the rabbis by way of Galen, that male semen is produced in the brain—food for thought that nourishes daring explorations of the meaning of seeking the divine in a world constantly suffering the existential assaults of death and disease. Cohen’s reading of the Mishnah may indeed be idiosyncratic and personalistic, but his hermeneutic is not arbitrary or willful; rather, it is humbled by immense respect for the mishnaic text as a tutorial voice to which the reader is invited to respond in full hermeneutical openness. His explications of the lessons learned from each of the Mishnah’s twelve psychopomps at times appear only loosely linked to a literal reading of the Mishnah; at times they are audacious in their assertions. But they are always thoughtful, provocative, and engaging. It is not too much to say that in Cohen, American Judaism has produced a union of poetic sensibility, theological vision, and religious sensitivity the likes of which have not been seen since the heyday of Abraham Joshua Heschel. I enthusiastically recommend this book as a text in advanced classes on contemporary meta-halakhic reflection, to anyone who is curious about contemporary Jewish theology and religious thought, as well as for readers who are simply in love with and curious about rabbinic texts and their interpretation.

The Odyssey of Political Theory: The Politics of Departure and Return. By Patrick J. Deneen. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. 275p.

This thoughtful and innovative book seeks to locate the polarities between which the Western intellectual and political traditions move in terms of a struggle within Odysseuss soul between endless departures and explorations and burstings of limits and “homeward returns” to family and polity that register his awareness of the perdurability of limits. In the end, Odysseus identifies (however ambivalently) with those limits, and his struggles and resolutions as recounted by Homer help to establish a framework in terms of which Deneen locates and evaluates the debate between Martha Nussbaum and her critics concerning the attractions and deficiencies of cosmopolitanism as both an ethical and a political program and set of values.

35.00 cloth.

Certain to become the most important work in political theory since John Rawlss A Theory of Justice, this book presents a brilliantly original, compelling vision of a just society-a world in which each of us may live his own life in his own way without denying the same right to others. Full of provocative discussions of issues ranging from education to abortion, it makes fascinating reading for anyone concerned with the future of the liberal democratic state.