The original work has been a favorite of both scholars and laypeople for its straightforward style, in contrast to other medieval writings on ethics that are largely theoretical and reflective.

Max J. Lee examines the philosophies of Platonism and Stoicism during the Greco-Roman era and their rivals including Diaspora Judaism and Pauline Christianity on how to transform a person's character from vice to virtue. He describes each philosophical school's respective teachings on diverse moral topoi such as emotional control, ethical action and habit, character formation, training, mentorship, and deity." --provided by publisher.

This third volume in the definitive edition of Dewey's early work opens with his tribute to George Sylvester Morris, the former teacher who had brought Dewey to the University of Michigan.

In this book, Joseph Citron offers the first comprehensive analysis of Prague Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz's (1565-1629) magnum opus of Jewish ethical literature, the Shnei Luhot Ha-Berit. Citron's close philological analysis reveals the pioneering nature of the work in creating an organic Jewish theological system rooted in the mystical structures of Kabbalah, cultivating an orthodoxy in thought and legal practice based upon its principles. Emotion, psychology, self-actualisation and joy are all presented as essential facets of religious life, significantly influencing (...) the 17th-century Sabbatean movement, the 18th-century Hasidic movement, and the Orthodox movement of the 19th century. The book is essential for scholars and laypeople alike wishing to understand the evolution of European Judaism in the early modern period. (shrink)

A recent project at the University of Denver Libraries used handwritten text recognition (HTR) software to create transcriptions of records from the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society (JCRS), a tuberculosis sanatorium located in Denver, Colorado from 1904 to 1954. Among a great many other potential uses, these type- and hand-written records give insight into the human experience of disease and epidemic, its treatment, its effect on cultures, and of Jewish immigration to and early life in the American West. (...) Our intent is to provide these transcripts as data so the text may be computationally analyzed, pursuant to a larger effort in developing capacity in services and infrastructure to support digital humanities as a library, and to contribute to the emerging HTR ecosystem in archival work. Just because we can, however, doesn’t always mean we should: the realities of publishing large datasets online that contain medical and personal histories of potentially vulnerable people and communities introduce serious ethical considerations. This paper both underscores the value of HTR and frames ethical considerations related to protecting data derived from it. It suggests a terms-of-use intervention perhaps valuable to similar projects, one that balances meeting the research needs of digital scholars with the care and respect of persons, their communities and inheritors, who lives produced the very data now valuable to those researchers. (shrink)

Interiority and Law presents a groundbreaking reassessment of a medieval Jewish classic, Baḥya ibn Paquda's Guide to the Duties of the Hearts. Michaelis reads this work anew as a revolutionary intervention in Jewish law, or halakha. Overturning perceptions of Baḥya as the shaper of an ethical-religious form of life that exceeds halakha, Michaelis offers a pioneering historical and conceptual analysis of the category of "inner commandments" developed by Baḥya. Interiority and Law reveals that Baḥya's main effort revolved around (...) establishing a new legal formation - namely, the "duties of the hearts" - which would deal entirely with human interiority. Michaelis takes up the implications of Baḥya's radical innovation, examining his unique mystical model of proximity to God, which he based on an increasingly growing fulfillment of the inner commandments. With an integrative approach that puts Baḥya in dialogue with other medieval Muslim and Jewish religious thinkers, this work offers a fresh perspective on our understanding of the interconnectedness of the dynamic, neighboring religious traditions of Judaism and Islam. Contributing to conversations in the history of religion, Jewish studies, and medieval studies on interiority and mysticism, this book reveals Baḥya as a revolutionary and demanding thinker of Jewish law. (shrink)

This essay is a close examination of one of Nahman of Bratslav's early and largely unexamined texts, Sefer ha‐Middot. The question it addresses is whether one can call this a study of “ethics” or, in Jewish nomenclature, musar, a work that seeks to cultivate human behaviors and describe ethical formation. In addition, it asks whether Sefer ha‐Middot can be called a text of “virtue ethics” given its focus on virtues and their enactment. The essay argues that (...) Nahman's peculiar metaphysical notion that all mitzvot are inextricably intertwined prevents any analysis of behavioral causality severing his “ethics” from any Aristotelian or Kantian tradition and brings him closer to Alasdair MacIntyre's notion of ethics as tied to traditional norms. And even with MacIntyre, the comparison is quite limited. Discussing “faith,” the “zaddik,” and “money,” the essay explores Nahman's view of how these and other virtues are cultivated and achieved. (shrink)

This third volume in the definitive edition of Dewey's early work opens with his tribute to George Sylvester Morris, the former teacher who had brought Dewey to the University of Michigan. Morris's death in 1889 left vacant the Department of Philosophy chairmanship and led to Dewey's returning to fill that post after a year's stay at Minnesota. Appearing here, among all his writings from 1889 through 1892, are Dewey's earliest comprehensive statements on logic and his first book on (...) class='Hi'>ethics. Dewey's marked copy of the galley-proof for his important article The Present Position of Logical Theory, recently discovered among the papers of the Open Court Publishing Company, is used as the basis for the text, making available for the first time his final changes and corrections. The textual studies that make The Early Works unique among American philosophical editions are reported in detail. One of these, A Note on Applied Psychology, documents the fact that Dewey did not co-author this book frequently attributed to him. Six brief unsigned articles written in 1891 for a University of Michigan student publication, the Inlander, have been identified as Dewey's and are also included in this volume. In both style and content, these articles reflect Dewey's conviction that philosophy should be used as a means of illuminating the contemporary scene; thus they add a new dimension to present knowledge of his early writing. (shrink)

This essay presents and analyzes the recent work of four prominent contemporary Jewish ethicists: Eugene Borowitz, David Novak, Byron Sherwin, and Walter Wurzburger. These authors are united in their affirmation of covenant as the central category of Jewish moral obligation and their concern to construct a Jewish ethic out of the classical sources of Judaism. Yet, as an individual analysis of their books will show, they adopt markedly different views of the authority of traditional Jewish law (...) , the respective roles of individual and community in moral deliberation, and the degree to which changing historical circumstances alter moral truths. (shrink)

Joseph Gikatilla's early works, composed during the 1270s, have been understood by many scholars as a fusion of Kabbalah and philosophy—an approach that he abandoned in his later compositions. This paper argues that Gikatilla's early works are in fact consistent with his later works, and that the differences between the two can be explained by the polemical engagement during his early period with Jewish philosophy and Christian missionizing. By subtly drawing Jewish students (...) of philosophy away from Aristotelian speculation and towards Kabbalah, Gikatilla sought in his early works to lay the foundation for an understanding of Judaism based on kabbalistic mytho-poesis and ecstatic mystical experience. (shrink)

This essay offers a Jewish approach to ethnography in religious ethics. Following the work of other ethnographers working in religious ethics, I explore how an ethnographic account of reproductive ethics among Haredi Jewish women in Jerusalem enhances and improves Jewish ethical discourse. I argue that ethnography should become an integral part of Jewish ethics for three reasons. First, with a contextual approach to guidance and application of law and norms, an ethnographic approach (...) to Jewish ethics parallels the way ethical decisions are made on a daily basis in Jewish communities. Second, ethnography bolsters the voices of those involved in ethical discourse. Third, ethnography facilitates the bridge between local ethical questions and global ethical discourse. (shrink)

Over the past decade much significant new work has appeared in the field of Jewish ethics. While much of this work has been devoted to issues in applied ethics, a number of important essays have explored central themes within the tradition and clarified the theoretical foundations of Jewish ethics. This important text grew out of the need for a single work which accurately and conveniently reflects these developments within the field. The first text of its (...) kind in almost two decades, Contemporary Jewish Ethics and Morality presents wide-ranging and carefully organized recent essays on Jewish ethical theory and practice. Serving as an introduction to Jewish ethics, it acquaints the student with the distinctive methodological issues involved and offers a sampling of Jewish positions on contemporary moral problems. The book features work from both traditionalist and liberal contributors, making this the only volume which encompasses the full range of contemporary Jewish ethical perspectives. Writers such as Harold Schulweis, Judith Plaskow, David Novak, David Hartman, and Blu Greenberg discuss law and ethics, natural law, humility, justice, sex and the family, euthanasia, and other vital issues relating to modern Judaism. Many of the readings appear here for the first time, making this important text the most timely sourcebook in its field. Uniquely qualified to reflect the high level and depth of contemporary work in this area of study, Contemporary Jewish Ethics and Morality is an essential contribution to any course dealing with Jewish ethics. (shrink)

Volume 4 of’ “The Early Works” series covers the period of Dewey’s last year and one-half at the University of Michigan and his first half-year at the University of Chicago. In addition to sixteen articles the present volume contains Dewey’s reviews of six books and three articles, verbatim reports of three oral statements made by Dewey, and a full-length book, The Study of Ethics. Like its predecessors in this series, this volume presents a “clear text,” free of (...) interpretive or reference material. Apparatus, including references, corrections, and emendations, is confined to appendix material. Fredson Bowers, the Consulting Textual Editor, has provided an essay on the textual principles and procedures, and Wayne A. R. Leys, Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, has written an Introduction discussing the relationship between Dewey’s writings of this period and his later work. That Dewey’s scholarship and writing was at an especially high level during 1893 and 1894 may be considered an index to the significance of this two-year period. (shrink)

The Crisis of German Historicism Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss - two major political thinkers of the twentieth century, both of German- Jewish background and forced into exile in America - were never friends or intellectual interlocutors. Yet they shared a radical critique of contemporary idioms of politically oriented discourses and a lifelong effort to modify reflective approaches to political experience. Liisi Keedus reveals how Arendt's and Strauss's thinking about political modernity was the product of a common intellectual formation (...) in Weimar Germany, by examining the cross-disciplinary debates guiding their early work. Through a historical reconstruction of their shared interrogative horizons - comprising questions regarding the possibility of an ethically engaged political philosophy after two world wars, the political fate of Jewry, the implications of modern conceptions of freedom, and the relation between theoria and praxis - Keedus unravels striking similarities, as well as genuine antagonisms, between the two thinkers. (shrink)

In this study of Giorgio Agamben's pre-Homo Sacer work, I assess his idea of the ethical subject. Over the course of these early writings, he adopts a Walter Benjamin-inspired redemptive aim as he endeavours to uncover the circumstances of alienated subjectivity and possibility of authentic experience. However, while Agamben borrows from Benjamin to elaborate on the ethical potential of the nihilist pose, a more Kantian conception of idealist autonomy becomes increasingly pronounced. This Kantianism is at odds with the Benjaminian (...) nihilism that guides his redemptive prescription, leaving Agamben's ethical subject mired in a realm of meaningless authenticity. (shrink)

Spinoza's Ethics is one of the most remarkable, important, and difficult books in the history of philosophy: a treatise simultaneously on metaphysics, knowledge, philosophical psychology, moral philosophy, and political philosophy. It presents, in Spinoza's famous 'geometric method', his radical views on God, Nature, the human being, and happiness. In this wide-ranging 2006 introduction to the work, Steven Nadler explains the doctrines and arguments of the Ethics, and shows why Spinoza's endlessly fascinating ideas may have been so troubling to (...) his contemporaries, as well as why they are still highly relevant today. He also examines the philosophical background to Spinoza's thought and the dialogues in which Spinoza was engaged - with his contemporaries, with ancient thinkers, and with his Jewish rationalist forebears. His book is written for the student reader but will also be of interest to specialists in early modern philosophy. (shrink)

For over a century, Hegel’s view of war is seen as controversial that results in mutually exclusive interpretations. To reach a proper evaluation of Hegel’s views, it is necessary to consider both Hegel’s initial states of philosophical doctrine about war and peace, and the development of his understanding of war from early works to mature ones. In the first part of the paper, I characterize Kant’s position on war, since it was the starting point for Hegel. Contrary to (...) popular representations about Kant as an exclusive pacifist, the philosopher of Koenigsberg had a philosophical-historical treatment of war, in which the war appeared as something sublime. However, both legal-ethical peace understanding and veto of war from the point of practical reason were not dominant in Kant’s philosophy, subordinating the sublime treatment of war. Kant’s next contemporaries could not already keep this position, emphasizing either one or the other side of war interpretation. Starting from the early writings (the paper “On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law” or manuscripts “System of Ethical Life” and “The German Constitution”), Hegel stresses an ethical aspect of war and its necessity, so that the shield is arranged on the way of systems isolation and individuals atomization, and the unity in its ethical health is saved. Perpetual peace, on the contrary, leads to diseases. The statement about equality of claims and the same truthfulness of warring parties’ rights is the originality of Hegel’s view. It makes absolutely impossible the war evaluation from the point of its justice and injustice. (shrink)

Religion and science dialogues that orbit around rational method, knowledge, and truth are often, though not always, contentious. In this article, I suggest a different cluster of gravitational points around which religion and science dialogues might usefully travel: philosophical anthropology, ethics, and love. I propose seeing morality as a natural outgrowth of the human desire to establish and maintain social bonds so as not to experience the condition of being alone. Humans, of all animals, need to feel loved—defined as (...) a compassionate present-with in dynamic dyadic relation such that one experiences the sense of mattering—but that need has an equally natural tendency to be met by creating biased us-and-them distinctions. A “critical” natural ethics, then, is one in which we become aware of and work to undermine our tendency to reify in-group distinctions between “us” and “them.” Religious communities that work intentionally on this can be seen, to some extent, as laboratories of love—or as sites for co-creating knowledge in perilous times. (shrink)

This article presents evidence supporting the claim that ethical reasoning is a skill that can be taught and assessed. We propose a working definition of ethical reasoning as 1) the ability to identify, analyze, and weigh moral aspects of a particular situation, and 2) to make decisions that are informed and warranted by the moral investigation. The evidence consists of a description of an ethical reasoning education program—Ethical Reasoning in Action —designed to increase ethical reasoning skills in a variety of (...) situations and areas of life. ERiA is housed at a public, major comprehensive U.S. university—James Madison University—and assessment of the program focuses on interventions delivered prior to and during orientation for incoming first-year students. Findings indicate that the interventions measurably enhance the ability of undergraduate students to reason ethically. ERiA’s competency-targeted program and positive student learning outcomes offers a promising model for higher education ethics programs seeking to connect classroom learning in ethics to decision-making in everyday life. (shrink)

In his landmark monograph, "The Politics of Jesus", John Howard Yoder challenged mainstream Christian social ethics by arguing that the New Testament account of Jesus's founding of a messianic community entails a normative politics, not only for early Christianity but for the contemporary church. This challenge is further elaborated in several important posthumous publications, especially "Preface to Theology", in which Yoder examines the development of early Christology with attention to its political and ethical implications, and "The (...) class='Hi'>Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited", Yoder's proposal for a renewed Jewish-Christian dialogue around the moral meaning of messianism. This article interprets these writings with reference to a range of critical scholarship on and about Yoder, Yoder and Augustine, and Jewish and Christian messianism, paying particular attention to questions of political ethics. (shrink)

This paper attempts to develop the foundations of a contemporary Jewish moral theory. It treats the Jewish legal and moral tradition as the object of an act of interpretive recovery that is carried out by contemporary Jews who are sensitive to the demands of their historical situation, a situation defined by the Nazi destruction of European Jewry and by the reestablishment of the Jewish state. In the course of the paper I develop an approach to post-Holocaust (...) class='Hi'>Jewish experience that derives from the work of Emil Fackenheim and try to show how Jewish moral imperatives arise within Fackenheim's account of the Jewish situation. The Jew's understanding of the role of God in moral obligation, his appreciation of the demands of the historical moment, and his interpretive recovery of the Jewish moral tradition-all are shown to depend upon and emerge from a reflective examination of Jewish moral and legal resistance during the Holocaust. (shrink)

Building on influential work in virtue ethics, this collection of essays examines the categories of self, person, and anthropology as foci for comparative analysis. The papers unite reflections on theory and method with descriptive work that addresses thinkers from the modern West, Christian and Jewish Late Antiquity, early China, and other settings. The introduction sets out central methodological issues that are subsequently taken up in each essay, including the origin of the categories through which comparison proceeds, the (...) status of these categories in the process of comparison, and the goals of comparison. In considering the question of goals, the introduction draws connections between comparative study and historical study within one tradition. Both types of analysis can bridge the gap between historical and normative work by attending to the ways in which the questions a scholar asks - not just the answers found - vary from one context to another. (shrink)

This two-volume work examines far-reaching debates on the concept of courage from Greek antiquity to the Christian and mediaeval periods, as well as the modern era. Volume 1 explains how competing accounts of epistêmê, rational wisdom, and truth dominated classical antiquity. Early Christian and mediaeval thinkers, in contrast, favoured fortitude founded on faith and fear of God over philosophical reasoning left to its own devices. Volume 2 turns to theories of courage from the early modern period to the (...) present. It shows how the twin laws of polis and physis are at the heart of post-medieval thought. Courage is found at the crossroads of love and dread, freedom and fate, happiness and suffering, as well as power and submission to the ruling order. The later influence of evolutionism, existentialism, and the social and natural sciences on moral philosophy is also addressed at some length. The protection of people's best interests, the passions and powers of the human will, and the rule of active energy in all aspects of life supplant courage formerly viewed through the lens of reason or faith, or a combination of the two. These new ideas, paradoxically, herald the end of the ethics of courage. They also undermine the courage of ethical thinking. Courage is no longer an end in itself, nor is it a means to happiness "at the end." Regardless of what Gandhi, Tillich, and Foucault have to say about the topic, late modernity and the global age witness a marked loss of interest in courage as an idea worthy of conceptual investigation. Debates about the moral implications of courage give way to the value-free science of resilience, which studies how people can recover from past trauma and find wellness, primarily in the realm of physis. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas is now widely recognised alongside Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre as one of the most important Continental philosophers of the twentieth century. His abiding concern was the primacy of the ethical relation to the other person and his central thesis was that ethics is first philosophy. His work has also had a profound impact on a number of fields outside philosophy such as theology, Jewish studies, literature and cultural theory, psychotherapy, sociology, political theory, international relations theory and (...) critical legal theory. This volume, first published in 2002, contains overviews of Levinas's contribution in a number of fields, and includes detailed discussions of his early and late work, his relation to Judaism and talmudic commentary, and his contributions to aesthetics and the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Elie Wiesel, plucked from the ashes of the Holocaust, became a Nobel Peace laureate, an activist on behalf of the oppressed, a teacher, an award-winning novelist, and a renowned humanist. He moved easily among world leaders but was equally at home among the disenfranchised. Following his Nobel Prize, Wiesel established the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity; one of their early initiatives was the founding of the Elie Wiesel Ethics Essay Contest. The reflections in this volume come from judges (...) of the contest. They share their personal and professional experiences working with and learning from Wiesel, providing a glimpse of the person behind the public figure. At a time when the future seems ominous and chaotic at best, these reflections hold on to the promise of an ethically and morally robust possibility. The students whose essays prompt this sense of hope are remarkable for their insight and dedication. The messages embedded in the judges’ reflections mirror Wiesel’s convictions about the importance of friendship, the need to interrogate (without abandoning) God, and the power of remembrance in order to fight indifference. (shrink)

Until recent times, the collection of Salomon Maimons early works written in Hebrew, Hesheq Shelomo, was not included into the scientific circulation. An article of professor Gideon Freudenthal on the formation of the young Maimon, filled this lacuna, proving the importance of the analysis of philosophers early works for the comprehension of his literary heritage in general. Freudenthal had studied and published Maimons introduction to Hesheq Shelomo, and then one of the collections treatises, Maаse Livnat ha-Sаppir, (...) consecrated to the ideas and notions of kabbalah. In his analysis Freudenthal had focused on Maimons rational interpretation of kabbalah. The present article represents an attempt to expand Freudenthals research, adding an analysis of another aspect of young Maimons thought. We will try to show that kabbalah, generally understood by early Maimon as ancient Jewish knowledge, had, according to the thinker, to complete philosophy and mitigate arising in it problems. In his early works Maimon was not only criticizing widely occurring profane kabbalah, but also Maimonides philosophy. According to Maimon, it is not possible to understand the true kabbalah without philosophy, but philosophical knowledge is not complete and often erroneous without kabbalah: the true kabbalah rectifies and adjusts it. The critic of Aristotelianism and its derivate, proposed by Maimon in his early works, can add clarity to the understanding of the development of his philosophical thought in the late period. (shrink)

Moses Maimonides, known by the acronym "Rambam," was unquestionably the foremost intellectual figure of medieval Judaism. Born in Cordova, Spain, forced at an early age to conceal his faith, he emigrated to Morocco and then Palestine before settling in Egypt, where financial necessity compelled him to study medicine and where he eventually became personal physician to Saladin. Although his medical skills were renowned and his writings in this field were widely studied throughout the Western world in the following centuries, (...) Maimonides' primary interest was theology. He devoted ten years to preparing Mishnah Torah and fifteen years to The Guide to the Perplexed - the first written in Hebrew, the second in Arabic. These studies of Jewish law were first considered radical in their efforts to reconcile religious and scientific thought, but later became pillars of traditional Jewish faith. Dr. Lenn Goodman has prepared new translations from these works, arranging the extensive excerpts by topic to focus on Maimonides' principal contributions to philosophy. These are accompanied by commentary and analysis, clarifying the complexities of his thought and providing the historical and religious background required by the modern lay reader. The introduction details Rambam's life and evaluates his role in history and theology. The study of Maimonides is essential to the understanding of Judaism and Western culture. Rambam makes his writings accessible to those who cannot work from the original texts, and meaningful to those who have not had extensive previous exposure to medieval theology. — Publisher description. (shrink)

Despite petitions from friends and critics through much of his career, Paul Ramsey adamantly refused to revise his first book, Basic Christian Ethics. Yet, several pieces of Ramsey’s private correspondence indicate specific changes to Basic Christian Ethics that he felt were necessary. These include a desire to distance his use of agape from associations with Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros, an added emphasis on the importance of the doctrine of creation for his understanding of agape, covenant, and natural (...) law, and a shift from eschatology to Christology as the foundational doctrine for political ethics. Drawing upon personal letters and other disparate comments throughout Ramsey’s published work, this paper explores the impact such proposed revisions might have on contemporary interest (or lack thereof) in Basic Christian Ethics. In so doing it also highlights Ramsey’s ability to rethink central theological concepts in his work and draw his readers’ attention to fundamental questions in the field of moral theology. (shrink)

The article analyses mystical teaching of Hasidism in the early works of Martin Buber (before publication of “I and Thou” in 1923) in the context of the concept of Orientalism by E. Said. Analysis is based on the M. Buber’s appeal to Hasidic sources in the 1900s-1910s (in particular, in his first two collections, “Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav” and “The Legend of Baal Shem”). Two factors allow examining Hasidism in the early Buber’s writings in the context of (...) Orientalism: a growing interest in the Orient in the circles of European Jewish intellectuals during late 19th cent, as well as the negative stereotype of traditional East European Jew (Ostjuden, “an Eastern Jews”) present in the modernized Jewish society. The article demonstrates that this stereotype is closely related to the criticism of Hasidism by representatives of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah). In particular, the accusations of traditional Eastern European Jews of inclination to vanity and prejudice, as well as of subjugation to the infinite power of the miracle workers (tzadikim), clearly have a source in maskilic criticism of Hasidism. The Buber’s turn towards Hasidism took place in mid-1900s. It was connected with Buber’s interest in Oriental mysticism, and with his social activities as “cultural Zionist”. Overcoming the “Ostjude” stereotype turned out to be an essential part of Buber’s cultural program. Buber reconstructs Jewish mysticism as an integral phenomenon, the subject of academic study. According to Buber, the most striking manifestation of this phenomenon is the Eastern-Euro pean mystical movement of Hasidism. It is from Ostjuden that the source of Hasidic wisdom is linked, which in the essays of the cycle of “Judaism” is a true “light from the East.”. (shrink)

Twentieth century continental thinkers such as Bergson, Levinas and Jonas have brought fresh and renewed attentions to Jewish ethics, yet it still remains fairly low profile in the Anglophone academic world. This collection of critical essays brings together the work of established and up-and-coming scholars from Israel, the United States, and around the world on the topic of Jewish religious and philosophical ethics. The chapters are broken into three main sections - Rabbinics, Philosophy, and Contemporary Challenges. (...) The authors address, using a variety of research strategies, the work of both major and lesser-known figures in historical Jewish religious and philosophical traditions. The book discusses a wide variety of topics related to Jewish ethics, including "ethics and the Mishnah," "Afro Jewish ethics," "Jewish historiographical ethics," as well as the conceptual/philosophical foundations of the law and virtues in the work of Martin Buber, Hermann Cohen, and Baruch Spinoza.The volume closes with four contributions on present-day frontiers in Jewish ethics. As the first book to focus on the nature, scope and ramifications of the Jewish ethics at work in religious and philosophical contexts, this book will be of great interest to anyone studying Jewish Studies, Philosophy and Religion. (shrink)

The remarkable diversity of Christianity during the formative years before the Council of Nicea has become a plain, even natural, "fact" for most ancient historians. Until now, however, there has been no sourcebook of primary texts that reveals the many varieties of Christian beliefs, practices, ethics, experiences, confrontations, and self-understandings. To help readers recognize and experience the rich diversity of the early Christian movement, After the New Testament provides a wide range of texts from the second and third (...) centuries, both "orthodox" and "heterodox," including such works as the Apostolic Fathers, the writings of Nag Hammadi, early pseudepigrapha, martyrologies, anti-Jewish tractates, heresiologies, canon lists, church orders, liturgical texts, and theological treatises. Rather than providing only fragments of texts, this collection prints large excerpts--entire documents wherever possible--organized under social and historical rubrics. This unique reader's concise and informative introductions and clear and up-to-date English translations make it ideal for courses on the New Testament, Christian Origins, Early Church History, or Late Antiquity. It will also be of interest to anyone--student, scholar, and general reader alike--interested in the entire range of early Christian literature from the period after the New Testament up to the writings of the so-called father of church history, Eusebius. (shrink)

This dissertation sets out to discuss some features of Spinoza's concepts of conatus and causation, through a discussion of the overall structure of the Ethics. ;The major portion of the dissertation is devoted to Spinoza's method, as employed in the Ethics, the notorious geometric method. I argue against the traditional reading of the method as a simple geometric device, and for a position which emphasizes how the method itself leads the reader to come to the highest kinds of (...) knowledge. This is accomplished both with reference to Spinoza's early modern contemporaries, and older Jewish antecedent. ;The reconsideration of method leads, respectively, to a discussion of the conatus in Spinoza's philosophy, and the centrality of adequate cause. The conatus is viewed as a way of making Spinoza's philosophy jibe with our phenomenal world, and to show how we express ourselves through the metaphysical, physical and rational structures detailed in the first two books of the Ethics. Hence it allows us to view the work itself as a way of coming to terms with, and moving towards, knowledge sub specie aeternitatis. ;The centrality of adequate cause similarly helps us to see that Spinoza's interest is not so much in detailing the metaphysical structure of the world, but teaching us to express ourselves in and through it. That is the ultimate goal of the method itself. (shrink)

Twentieth century continental thinkers such as Bergson, Levinas and Jonas have brought fresh and renewed attentions to Jewish ethics, yet it still remains fairly low profile in the Anglophone academic world. This collection of critical essays brings together the work of established and up-and-coming scholars from Israel, the United States, and around the world on the topic of Jewish religious and philosophical ethics. The chapters are broken into three main sections - Rabbinics, Philosophy, and Contemporary Challenges. (...) The authors address, using a variety of research strategies, the work of both major and lesser-known figures in historical Jewish religious and philosophical traditions. The book discusses a wide variety of topics related to Jewish ethics, including "ethics and the Mishnah," "Afro Jewish ethics," "Jewish historiographical ethics," as well as the conceptual/philosophical foundations of the law and virtues in the work of Martin Buber, Hermann Cohen, and Baruch Spinoza.The volume closes with four contributions on present-day frontiers in Jewish ethics. As the first book to focus on the nature, scope and ramifications of the Jewish ethics at work in religious and philosophical contexts, this book will be of great interest to anyone studying Jewish Studies, Philosophy and Religion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:When We Collide: Sex, Social Risk, and Jewish Ethics by Rebecca J. Epstein-LeviJoshua Stein (bio)When We Collide: Sex, Social Risk, and Jewish Ethics by Rebecca J. Epstein-Levi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023Sex is messy:Ethicists have an unfortunate habit of speaking of sex—or "good" sex, anyway—in lofty, aspirational terms: the physical and spiritual union of committed partners, the human sharing in divine creativity, the two (...) becoming one, and so on. This image of choreographed perfection is reproduced in popular culture. … But the actual practice of sex, by ordinary people, is not so lofty, so beautifully synchronous. Real sex, even "good" sex, is carnivalesque, even grotesque. Real sex involves fluids, farts, jiggling, grunting, adjustments of position, arms falling asleep, and accidental pinching or pulling of hair … and the making of a vast number of frankly ridiculous faces (83).Rebecca J. Epstein-Levi's When We Collide (2023) challenges us to think about sex as it is, rather than as we are conditioned to talk about it (or as we might sometimes like to imagine it). This is foundational to the book. There is a familiar tradition of sanitizing sex, reducing it to teleology, idealized bodies, heteronormativity, and venerated social institutions. In dispensing with this sanitized illusion, the book adopts a healthier and more honest relationship with sex; in order to have a productive discussion about the ethics of any human activity, that discussion should represent the human activity faithfully. Part of the reason that Epstein-Levi takes this approach is to distinguish Jewish ethics' discussion of sex, which regards sex, and therefore sexual ethics, "as an empirical, lived, and granular phenomenon" (3).Discussions in Jewish sexual ethics should treat sex as a lived social experience and be responsive to the messiness of that experience. Epstein-Levi argues that sanitizing sex through appeal to a nebulous notion of how historical [End Page 99] religious traditions must have been puritanical is ahistorical, chauvinistic, and inconsistent with scholarship on rabbinic texts.This is a striking and perhaps subversive view in our present context. Centrally, many associate "religious views" (especially in sexual ethics) with politically Conservative and purity-driven views characteristic of some Christian traditions. The term "Judeo-Christian" in American political discourse is often used evocatively of the heteronormative, sanitized, idealized posture toward sex that Levi explicitly rejects. Epstein-Levi's book recognizes that rabbinic scholarship underrepresents marginalized communities, including women, LGBTQ+ people, and disabled people. This is the major moral and practical focus of Epstein-Levi's analysis; historical traditions in which dominant moral views are shaped by a particular group often have glaring blind spots. When we recognize those blind spots, as members of that tradition, need to be updated simply to address sex as it exists, not as we idealize it.The book centers Jewish texts and methods of thought, but (in my view) readers who will benefit most from reading Epstein-Levi's book are non-Jewish readers thinking about sex. Epstein-Levi's book illustrates methodological differences in Jewish ethics from other approaches. The ethics of sex should change as our knowledge of sex changes; as we learn about sexual activity and about the social lives of people, we should apply that knowledge to our understanding. For Jewish thought, ethics is discursive, not fixed; our understanding of ethics requires constant consideration and discussion as our understanding of the world changes and improves.One central focus of the book is risk; our knowledge of sex changes as we understand and mediate against the risks involved in sexual activity and as we learn more about how risk works itself. Risk is tied up in all social activity, including sex. The ethics of sex requires discussion of risk but often does so in a way not congruous with the discussion of risk in other areas of social life. "Sex is dangerous. … Sexual intercourse opens us up to risks of infections, violence, and, if we are in possession of functional ovaries and a uterus, pregnancy" (98). All social activity is risky; we are all acutely aware given the prospects of exposure to strains of a novel coronavirus and the way we have changed our... (shrink)

Halakhah and ethics in the Jesus tradition -- Matthew's divorce texts in the light of pre-rabbinic Jewish law -- Let the dead bury their dead : Jesus and the law revisited -- James, Israel, and Antioch -- Natural law in Second Temple Judaism -- Natural law in the New Testament? -- The Noachide commandments and New Testament ethics -- The beginning of Christian public ethics : from Luke to Aristides and Diognetus -- Jewish and Christian (...) public ethics in the early Roman Empire. (shrink)