Jewish Philosophy

Philosophy

• Jewish Philosophy 1 From the wisdom poetry of Job and Ecclesiastes to the rational defenses of revelation by Saadia Gaon and Judah Halevi — a journey through three thousand years of Jewish thought beginning with the Bible itself. Covers biblical wisdom, Second Temple literature, Philo of Alexandria, rabbinic thought, and the first medieval philosophers.
• Jewish Philosophy 2 The high medieval flowering of Jewish philosophy — from the rationalism of Maimonides and his Guide for the Perplexed, through the Neoplatonism of Ibn Gabirol, to the mystical symbolism of the Zohar and Lurianic Kabbalah. Explores how Jewish thinkers navigated between reason and tradition, philosophy and mysticism.
• Jewish Philosophy 3 From Spinoza's excommunication and revolutionary philosophy through the Haskalah, Hasidism, and Hermann Cohen — the tumultuous encounter between Jewish tradition and European modernity. Asks whether Jews can be both fully modern and fully Jewish, and what Jewish thought contributes to European philosophy.
• Jewish Philosophy 4 The 20th-century confrontation of Jewish thought with existentialism, political catastrophe, and the Holocaust. Rosenzweig's dialogical theology, Buber's I and Thou, Levinas on the face of the other, Arendt on totalitarianism, and the theologians who asked whether faith was possible after Auschwitz.
• Jewish Philosophy 5 Contemporary Jewish philosophy — feminist theology, post-Holocaust thought, Orthodox philosophy, American Jewish pragmatism, and the living dialogue between Jewish tradition and global ethics. Asks what 3,000 years of Jewish reflection contributes to the moral and spiritual questions of the present.