Jewish Philosophy: Perspectives and Retrospectives

In a lecture title “Jewish Philosophy: An Obituary,” Paul Mendes-Flohr observed that “Jewish philosophers seem to be a dying breed.” However tongue in cheek the statement may have been at the close of the twentieth century by a scholar of modern Jewish thought, a similar pessimistic observation was made quite seriously at the beginning of the twentieth century by Isaac Husik in his History of Medieval Jewish Philosophy (1916), which he sadly concludes with the words, “There are Jews now and there are philosophers, but there are no Jewish philosophers and there is no Jewish philosophy.” This volume, as one more modest contribution to the exponentially increasing publications, in Hebrew and in other languages, of original thought and of scholarly analysis, proves that obituaries for Jewish philosophy and thought are exaggerated, premature, and ultimately far off the mark. Husik’s own work helped start the revival of a field for which he – like nineteenth century scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentums – mistakenly thought he was writing an epitaph. This collection includes two symposia, on “The Renaissance of Jewish Philosophy in America” and on “Maimonides on the Eternity of the World,” as well as other studies in medieval Jewish philosophy and modern Jewish thought. Contributors include: Leora Batnitzky, Ottfried Fraisse, William A. Galston, Lenn E. Goodman , Raphael Jospe, Steven Kepnes, Haim Howard Kreisel, Charles Bezalel Manekin, Haggai Mazuz, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Alan Mittleman, Michael Morgan, David Novak, James T. Robinson, Norbert M. Samuelson, Dov Schwartz, Yossef Schwartz, Kenneth Seeskin, Roslyn Weiss, and Martin Yaffe.