Online research in philosophy

Bringing the topic down to earth -- The body of Jewish law : how Jewish law resembles other legal systems -- The covenantal soul of Jewish law : how Jewish law is unique -- Motivations to live by Jewish law -- Continuity and change in Jewish law -- The relationship of Jewish law to morality and theology -- Jewish law and custom -- Comparisons to the right and the left -- Applications of my theory of Jewish law to specific cases.

There is a sort of natural closeness between Sartre and violence. Many have claimed that Sartre was fascinated by violence. Authors as diverse as Michel-Antoine Burnier and Mohamed Harbi have criticised the violence in Sartre, and even Bernard-Henri Lévy sees in Sartre's preface to Fanon's Les Damnés de la Terre a 'Sartre possédé'. Unlike these authors, we claim that Sartre was in no way fascinated by violence. In his eyes, violence was an historical fact that was characteristic of his time and which he, personally, discovered at an early age. What is more, Sartre's violence is situational. If he discovered the world in books, it was also in books that he discovered violence. Books and history were the melting pots of a violence that haunts Sartre's work. The historical situations in which he found himself explain the omnipresence of violence in his work.

Some have characterized the twentieth century as a Nietzschean century, while others, such as Bernard-Henri Lévy, call this Le siècle de Sartre. Those who are interested in the works of Sartre and Nietzsche wish to know what these two authors, who have left a deep impression on the twentieth century, share in common. Others, myself included, dare to ask: "Was Sartre a Nietzschean?" Studies on this connection are few and, besides Jean-François Louette's book, Sartre contra Nietzsche, no major study exists. What is the particular nature of the relations between their thoughts? Is there an influence of Nietzsche upon Sartre? Is there a philosophical kinship? I will begin by clarifying the question of Sartre's interest in Nietzsche. Then, I will demonstrate that they had the same philosophical starting point: nihilism. Finally, I will show that both give a similar answer to the problem opened by nihilism, the question of meaning.

The question of nationalism as spoken about in contem porary circles is structurally the same as Marx's 'Jewish Question'. Through a reading of Marx's early writings, particularly the 'Jewish Question' essay, guided by Derrida's Specters of Marx and Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, it is possible to begin to rethink the nationalist question. In this light, nationalism emerges as the byproduct of the reduction of heterogeneous 'people' into a homo geneous 'state'; such 'excessive' voices occupy an ontological space outside of the categories within which the state operates, and thus return, in Derrida's terms, to 'haunt' it. When the nationalist ques tion is viewed in this way, contemporary solutions that depend on reproducing this reduction are called into question. Key Words: B. Anderson • Derrida • G. Gottlieb • R. Kaplan • Marx • nationalism.

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.

Literature, for Sartre, it could be said, is not so much an object of theory as the focus of a question. The notion of 'committed literature' is less prescriptive than it is interrogative: the title of the text most commonly associated with 'littérature engagée' is, after all, a question about literature itself, and the nature of 'commitment' lends itself much more to a practice of contestation than to implementation of any particular programme. In what follows, I shall be examining some of the ways in which Sartre makes literature synonymous with a question. And I shall be arguing that the very terms in which literature is presented as a form of self-contestation make biography, rather than theory, the arena in which the notion of literature is most extensively opened up.

S. Leyla Gürkan’s The Jews as a Chosen People: Tradition and Transformation is a bold attempt to trace the concept of the election of Israel from its Biblical and early Rabbinic development to the early modern and post-holocaust periods. Written as the history of an idea, the common thread tying the work together is the account and analysis of how this single, sometimes thorny, question of “chosenness” has animated Jewish conceptions of identity throughout its history. The author’s focus on this idea serves as the motivation of the work to describe how “the idea of chosenness . . . is the raison d’être of the Jewish religion as well as the Jewish people” (p. 1). The author describes the question of ..

Alain Finkelkraut has interrogated contemporary Jewish identity in terms of how a Jew reckons with the heavy impact of the Holocaust and in fact with the entire history of the Jewish people. Finkelkraut takes issue with Sartre's 1947 essay, Anti-Semite and Jew, not for its content but the effect that it has had on him. "Let there be no misunderstanding: I am not attacking the book that Sartre wrote on the Jewish problem," asserts the author in a footnote (JI 17, my translation). Instead, he shows how the philosopher aids in the creation of what Finkelkraut terms "the imaginary Jew." He compares this process of fossilization to Genet's treatment in Saint Genet. Finkelkraut's metaphoric language captures the pernicious effects that the public act of naming and thus essentializing can have on a person or group of people.

Using Sartre is an introduction to the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre which promotes Sartrean views but adopts a consistently analytical approach to him. Concentrating on his early philosophy, up to and including Sartre's masterwork Being and Nothingness, Gregory McCulloch demonstrates how much analytical philosophers miss when they neglect Sartre and the continental tradition in philosophy. In the classic spirit of analytical philosophy, Using Sartre is a clear and pithy exposition of Sartre's early work. Written specifically for beginners and non-specialists, the book is sure to spark new interest in Sartre and the existentialists while also making a significant contribution to the analytical philosophy of mind. It indicates how the analytical and continental approaches to philosophy may be brought into closer relation to one another.

Jean-Paul Sartre''s position on religion has traditionally been reduced to variations of his well-known atheism. This is a result of collapsing the distinction between religion and theism, as both critics and supporters of Sartre have commonly done. Consequently, attention to Sartre''s persistent and pervasive concern with religious ideas, symbols, and experiences has been neglected. While the religious implications of Sartre''s thought have mostly been considered in relation to Christian theology, other newer areas of religious studies suggest additional avenues for considering Sartre. Sartre''s possible connections to four such areas are discussed: 1) Eastern religions; 2) Jewish studies; 3) feminist theology, and 4) the psychoanalysis of religion.