Online research in philosophy

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The year 1492 is only the last in a series of “ends” that inform the representation of medieval Spain in modern Jewish historical and literary discourses. These ends simultaneously mirror the traumas of history and shed light on the discursive process by which hermetic boundaries are set between periods, communities, and texts. This book addresses the representation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the end of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain). Here, the end works to locate and separate Muslim from Christian Spain, Jews from Arabs, philosophy from Kabbalah, Kabbalah from literature, and texts from contexts. The book offers a reading of texts that emerge from its Andalusi, Jewish, and Arabic cultural sphere: Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed; the major text of Kabbalah, the Zohar; and the Arabic rhymed prose narrative of Ibn al-Astarkuwi. The author argues that these texts are written in a language that disrupts the possibility of locating it in a pre-existing cultural situation, a recognizable literary tradition, or a particular genre. At stake are issues – texts and contexts – that have gained particular urgency in the writings of such recent thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Avital Ronell. The book reads the place and taking place of language, interrogating the notion of disappearing contexts and the view that language is derivative of its true place, the context that, having ended, is mourned as silent and lost.

Abstract This paper deals with the concept of pedagogical content knowledge in the context of the teaching of Jewish moral texts in Jewish day?schools. The author's approach views pedagogical content knowledge as the dimension of translating subject?matter knowledge for teaching. Teaching Jewish texts is nowadays becoming a highly complicated task, because most Jews no longer accept the a priori authority of the Jewish texts. In order to understand the pedagogical content knowledge involved in teaching moral texts, an analysis is presented here of the process taking place during teachers? workshops.

Extraits de la Source de vie de Salomon ibn-Gebirol.--Ibn-Gebirol, ses écrits et sa philosophie.--Des principaux philosophes arabes et de leurs doctrines.--Esquisse historique de la philosophie chez les Juìfs.--Appendice.--Texte hébreu des extraits de la Source de vie (2 p.l., 36 numb. l. at end).

Salomon Maimon (1753-1800), one of the most fascinating characters of eighteenth-century intellectual history, came from a traditional orthodox Jewish community in Eastern Europe to Berlin to seek Enlightenment. Maimon remained an outsider: an 'Ostjude' among the enlightened Jews in Berlin, a freethinker among observant Jews and a Jew among the non-Jews. His autobiography became a classic of autobiographical literature of the Enlightenment. His 'inter-cultural' experience is reflected in his philosophy. Indebted to the Maimonidean as well as to the modern European (notably Kantian) philosophical tradition, he attempted a synthesis of normally exclusive orientations: 'Rational Dogmatism' and 'Empirical Skepticism'. Maimon's importance in the development from Kant to German Idealism has been acknowledged, but the interpretation of his own philosophical position suffered much from this narrow perspective. The essays of leading scholars collected in this volume focus on his synthesis of 'Rational Dogmatism' and 'Empirical Skepticism'.

This book provides a historical and comparative study of logic in Arabic in Bosnia and Herzegovina, from the first texts, 16th century, to the end of the 19th ...

The question of which areas of the earth are fit for human habitation and which ones are not is dealt with in several Hebrew scientific texts of the twelfth and thirteenth century. Medieval Jewish scholars such as Abraham bar [Hdotu]iyya, Samuel ibn Tibbon, and the three thirteenth-century Hebrew encyclopedists were familiar with theories of the oikoumene and its boundaries through Arabic sources. These Hebrew texts display a variety of views on the earth's habitability, all of which ultimately go back to antiquity. Whereas some texts adopted a division of the inhabited portion of the earth into seven climes, others divided the earth into five zones of temperature, of which two were habitable and three were not owing to extreme temperatures. Some of these Jewish authors also pay attention to the question of how climatological or astrological conditions in a given region influence the mental constitution of its inhabitants.

He shows, for example, how the ethics of Judaism and the ethics of Jews often are at odds, how the Judeo-Christian ethic is an obsolete myth, and how Jewish and ...

It has long been considered that Arabic algebra scarcely left any traces in mathematical literature of Hebrew expression. Thanks to the unpublished sources we have discovered, and to an attentive examination of already-known texts, one can no longer subscribe to such a judgement. The evidence we examine in this first article sheds light on the circulation, in erudite Jewish circles, of Arabic algebraic knowledge in Spain, Italy, Provence, and Sicily, between the 12th and the 14th centuries. The Epistle on number by the Castillian astronomer Isaac ben Salomon al-A[hudot]dab was written in Sicily at the end of the 14th century, and based on the Talkhi[sudot] a'mal al-[hudot]isab of Ibn al-Banna' (1256-1321). That part of the Epistle that is devoted to algebra follows the tradition of al-Karaji. It offers, for the first time in Hebrew, a rational presentation of arithmetical operations extended to algebraic expressions.