Reorientation: Leo Strauss in the 1930s seeks to explain the 'change in orientation' that Strauss underwent during a decade of personal and political upheaval. Though he began to garner attention in the 1950s, it was in the 1930s that Strauss made a series of fundamental breakthroughs which enabled him to recover, for the first time since the Middle Ages, the genuine meaning of political philosophy. Despite this being a period of marked output and activity for Strauss, his research in this (...) era remains overlooked. This volume is the first to assemble in one place an examination of Strauss' various publications throughout the decade, providing a comprehensive analysis of his work during the period. It includes, for the first time in English, five newly translated writings of Strauss from 1929-37, brought to life with insight from leading scholars in the field. (shrink)

Moses Mendelssohn was the leading Jewish thinker of the German Enlightenment and the founder of modern Jewish philosophy. His writings, especially his attempt during the Pantheism Controversy to defend the philosophical legacies of Spinoza and Leibniz against F. H. Jacobi’s philosophy of faith, captured the attention of a young Leo Strauss and played a critical role in the development of his thought on one of the fundamental themes of his life’s work: the conflicting demands of reason and revelation. _ Leo (...) Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn_ is a superbly annotated translation of ten introductions written by Strauss to a multi-volume critical edition of Mendelssohn’s work. Commissioned in Weimar Germany in the 1920s, the project was suppressed and nearly destroyed during Nazi rule and was not revived until the 1960s. In addition to Strauss’s introductions, Martin D. Yaffe has translated Strauss’s editorial remarks on each of the passages he annotates in Mendelssohn’s texts and brings those together with the introductions themselves. Yaffe has also contributed an extensive interpretive essay that both analyzes the introductions on their own terms and discusses what Strauss writes elsewhere about the broader themes broached in his Mendelssohn studies. Strauss’s critique of Mendelssohn represents one of the largest bodies of work by the young Strauss on a single thinker to be made available in English. It illuminates not only a formerly obscure phase in the emergence of his thought but also a critical moment in the history of the German Enlightenment. (shrink)

Recognized as one of the leading philosophers and Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, Emil Ludwig Fackenheim has been widely praised for his boldness, originality, and profundity. As is well-known, a striking feature of Fackenheim's thought is his unwavering contention that the Holocaust brought about a radical shift in human history, so monumental and unprecedented that nothing can ever be the same again. Fackenheim regarded it as the specific duty of thinkers and scholars to assume responsibility to probe this historical (...) event for its impact on the human future and to make its immense ramifications evident. In Emil Fackenheim's Post-Holocaust Thought and Its Philosophical Sources, scholars consider important figures in the history of philosophy--including Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Strauss--and trace how Fackenheim's philosophical confrontations with each of them shaped his overall thought. This collection details which philosophers exercised the greatest influence on Fackenheim, and how he diverged from them. Incorporating widely varying approaches, the contributors in the volume wrestle with this challenge historically, politically, and philosophically in order to illuminate the depths of Fackenheim's own thought. (shrink)

A collection of essays on civil religion in modern political philosophy, exploring the engagement between modern thought and the Christian tradition.

Ritual atonement for Cohen aims exclusively at ethical repentance. Sins, or ethical failures, are regarded as unwitting misdeeds, corrigible once recognized. As individuals continue to vacillate, their need for repentance remains life-long. Rosenzweig, however, considers redemption from sin impossible without recourse to miracles. Individual failures are failures in wish, Rosenzweig implies, rather than failures in deed, as Cohen maintains; hence atonement requires above all the ongoing regulating of wishes through liturgical prayer. "Repentance" (t'shuvah), which for Cohen is the "return" to (...) ethical integrity, is for Rosenzweig the "return" to the daily, weekly, and yearly prayers of the Jewish liturgy. (shrink)

A complete translation in English of this modern text, with substantive apparatus to allow the student and serious reader to grapple in a meaningful way with this seminal text. The text includes ample footnotes, Spinoza’s annotations, an interpretative essay, glossary and other indices. Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood (...) by Spinoza’s immediate audience. This is the paperback edition. (shrink)

This volume is a scholarly tribute to Fackenheim’s memory. It covers a wide spectrum of Fackenheim’s work including biographical, philosophical, and theological aspects of his thought that have not been addressed adequately in the past. Elie Wiesel, a close personal friend to Fackenheim for over 30 years, has provided the Foreword for the volume.

Fackenheim's combination of erudition and generosity served to inspire a lifetime of philosophical inquiry, and a number of his students are represented in this ...

This volume is a collection of essays by various contributors in honor of the late Laurence Berns, Richard Hammond Elliot Tutor Emeritus at St. John's College, Annapolis. The essays address the literary, political, theological, and philosophical themes of his life's work as a scholar, teacher, and constant companion of the "great books.".

John Rawls was the most influential political thinker of the twentieth century. This book applies his theory of justice to four perennial matters of concern that remain contested in the twenty-first century. Drawing surprising implications, this book deepens our understanding of these issues and points the way toward rational, just policy reform.

In this paper it is demonstrated how the understanding of resilience is enhanced and shaped when using the concepts of oikos and life-modes. Instead of applying a rather problematic welfare capitalism model, which partially provides a negative social reproduction and production, it is suggested to apply a household/family model. The household/family model outlines that positive social reproduction and production, including real and productive values, potentially creates an essential bond between viable household, family, work, socialisation, and network based communities, resulting in (...) socially, economically, mentally, and ecologically sustainable survival of families and livelihoods over generations. Furthermore, it is stressed that serious fallacies will occur if resilience is solely understood and explained in terms of individual resources and characteristics. Nonetheless, it is recognised that non-cognitive traits such as persistence are important. Offspring is more strongly socialised and positioned in intact and viable families by transmitting and practicing a set of long-term reproduction and production strategies, which compared to upper strata are less common in the lower and middle strata. Thus, resilience is unequal. (shrink)

The paper has sought to show two things. One is that the apparent variety of Stalnaker and Lewis's counterexamples is misleading. Several of their examples are quite unsatisfactory because they depend on unguarded language behavior. There is in fact only one type of counterexample that is worth serious discussion, and that has the form of Barense's.For Barense's example, I try to show that it fails as a counterexample to transitivity because one of the premisses is false within the context of (...) the example. However, Barense's example is problematic for the Stalnaker-Lewis analysis, since their device for avoiding transitivity (rejecting the rule of conditional proof) does not in fact eliminate anomalous conclusions that can be drawn when both the premisses are taken as true.In sum, there appears to be no good reason to doubt thatif is transitive, that the antecedent of a conditional can be strengthened, and that the contrapositive can be inferred. And the rule of conditional proof does seem to capture a commonly accepted form of argument in support ofif-then statements. (shrink)

Odor detection and identification by machines is currently being done to evaluate perfumes, wine, olive, oil, and even find people buried in rubble. Extending body odor detection to authentication may seem far-fetched and unrealistic. Yet such an application is plausible, given that like a fingerprint or iris, the human body odor is unique. Although such technology still has strides to make before being applicable as either a stand-alone or supplemental technology to existing biometric tools, it still warrants research, especially in (...) how the technology is perceived. Numerous studies have addressed the public perception of biometric technologies, although odor scanning is one that has been under-addressed. This exploratory study addresses perceptions and attitudes of odor scanning and recommends directions for future research and practice. This study has found that odor scanning is little understood, and its benefit to security and privacy are perceived as low. Should body odor scanning develop into a viable method of biometric authentication, issues of perception and acceptance will need further attention by both research and practice. (shrink)