Michael Zank

Jaspers’ Achsenzeit Hypothesis: A Critical Reappraisal

Jaspers idea of a grand shift in the spiritual paradigm of unrelated civilizations, located rather generously somewhere around the middle of the first millennium BC, inspired only few historians, but a closer reading reveals that Jaspers was always more concerned with what we can learn for the situation of our own time from what is generally true about our perception of antiquity. Jaspers made this argument twice, namely, in 1931 and again in 1949. The post-modern situation, globalization, and the question of how we understand human existence under these conditions are still of obvious relevance. This essay also brings Jaspers’ idea of an axial age to bear on an ongoing study of the millennial history of Jerusalem.

Eugene Sheppard. Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2006. 188 pp.

calling back to life the ideas of a philosopher that for many years were considered virtually defunct. There were, of course, occasional glimpses of Cassirer’s spirit in the English-speaking world: Suzanne Langer’s 1942 Philosophy in a New Key, and Nelson Goodman’s 1978 Ways of Worldmaking (the first chapter of which Goodman read at the University of Hamburg on the occasion of Cassirer’s hundredth birthday). These cases aside, serious scholarship on Cassirer in the English-speaking world has been rare indeed. Why this is so deserves some reflection. Perhaps it is attributable to the fact that what counts as “continental philosophy” on this continent continues to drawmuch of its inspiration from the works of émigré intellectuals whose primary focus was political and social thought (Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, etc.), while Cassirer’s thoughts on politics were comparatively uninspired. His posthumously published The Myth of the State (1946), written during his final phase of exile in the United States, is surely his least successful work. Perhaps it is also because, ever since the famous Davos disputation of 1929, Cassirer’s reputation has seemed irreparably damaged. His interlocutor, Martin Heidegger, cast a strong spell over the audience in Switzerland, and even today it remains a commonplace view that Cassirer lost not only the debate but also the guarantee of an enduring intellectual legacy. In the postwar era, existentialism and phenomenology gained a significant following in the United States, whereas neo-Kantianism, along with Cassirer’s post-neo-Kantian cultural philosophy, seemed nearly forgotten. Not so in Germany. With communism’s collapse and the (eventual) success of reunification, a newly moderate strain of cultural philosophy has arisen for which Cassirer is arguably the most formidable representative. New scholarship on Cassirer includes works by Heinz Paetzold, Andreas Graeser, Oswald Schwemmer, Steve Lofts, and Michael Bösch, a critical volume edited by Dorothea Frede and Reinold Schmücker, and another by Dominic Kaegi and Enno Rudolph. Even Jürgen Habermas has acknowledged his debt to Cassirer in an essay, “The Liberating Power of Symbols” (originally in German, 1997). Into this crowd already thick with commentaries arrives Thomas Meyer with his thorough and painstakingly researched biography. It is a welcome addition, and truly indispensable for anyone interested in the details of Cassirer’s life and work.

Torah v. Jewish Law: A Genre-Critical Approach to the Political Theology of Reappropriation

Using M. Bakhtin’s genre-critical approach, I argue that the Torah, as a work of literature, shows similarities with the genre of the novel. This approach allows me to distinguish between Torah and rabbinic law, a difference that is relevant to understanding the categorical differences between two major moments of reappropriation and self-fashioning in light of these two distinct, though related, traditions, namely, the early modern Protestant use of the “ancient Hebrew republic” and the modern “Jewish law” (mishpat ivri) discourse in Russian Zionism and Israeli constitutional theory.

Introduction: Politics, Religion and Political Theology: Historical and Contemporary Questions

This volume had its origin in two lecture series hosted by the Institute for Philosophy and Religion at Boston University: one devoted to the issue of toleration and the other to varying appropriations of the notion of political theology. In the time since those series, the urgent and animating questions that connect these two important theologico-political conceptions—along with many relevant cognate notions, such as those of secularism and the post-secular, individual claims of conscientious conviction as well as the larger institutional frameworks within which such claims are articulated (church-state relations, the establishment of sharī‘a law, etc.)—have only gotten more pressing.

The Kant-Maimonides Constellation

Responding to Zachary Braiterman’s and Daniel Garner’s ideas on post-Holocaust religious thought, the author proposes a new model of relationships between theodicy and antitheodicy in which divine perfection is no longer privileged as the single key factor. Building on Peter Berger’s and Clifford Geertz’s treatments of the problem of evil, it is suggested that focusing on meaning-making and tradition can result in a stratified view of theodicy–antitheodicy more able to engage with the dynamics of several well-known thinkers associated with religious responses to the Holocaust.

The Heteronomy of Modern Jewish Philosophy

Abstract Proceeding from Jewish philosophy’s origins in the convergence and divergence of Greek and Jewish thought and the resulting possibilities of construing Judaism and philosophy as heterogeneous or homogeneous, and ranging across the three major “ages” or linguistic matrices of Jewish philosophizing (Hellenistic, Judeo-Arabic, and Germanic), the essay describes Jewish philosophy as an unresolvable entanglement in a dialectic of heteronomy and autonomy.

Zwischen den Stühlen? On the Taxonomic Anxieties of Modern Jewish Philosophy

As a subfield of Jewish Studies modern Jewish philosophy is haunted by challenges arising from the culturally specific circumstances and original goals pursued by the Jewish philosophers of the past that are no longer immediately accessible. This essay looks at systematic and historical aspects of Jewish philosophy with the aim of determining ways of retrieving the plausibility of a taxonomically problematic field operating at the intersections of philosophy, history, religion, and Judaism.