" Taking as its cue Derrida's readings of German-Jewish authors and his ongoing interest in questions of Jewishness, this book pairs his philosophy with that of Franz Rosenzweig, who developed a theory of Judaism for which election is ...

The article examines the messianic idea in philosophical works of Emmanuel Levinas. It analyzes the continuities and discontinuities between the views of Levinas and philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, and explores the implications of their messianic conception. It suggests that Levinas has offered a conception of messianic thinking as philosophy rather than of messianic philosophy in his Talmudic readings.

Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) was a leading figure in the Neo- Kantian philosophical movement that dominated European thought before 1918. He was also an inaugural figure in modern Jewish philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book explores Cohen's striking claim that ethics is rooted in law - a claim developed both in his philosophical ethics and his philosophy of Judaism, in particular in his writings on "love-of-neighbor," up to and including his well-known Religion of Reason. Dana Hollander proposes that (...) neither Cohen's systematic philosophy nor his "Jewish" philosophy should be seen as the dominant framework for his oeuvre as a whole, but that his understanding of key philosophical questions take shape in the passages between both corpuses, a trait that could be seen as paradigmatic for modern Jewish philosophy. Ethics Out of Law taps into one of the prime topics of current interest in the field of Jewish philosophy: the nature of Jewish political existence and the changing configurations of "law" that this entails. (shrink)

This highly original interpretation of Paul by the Jewish philosopher of religion Jacob Taubes was presented in a number of lectures held in Heidelberg toward the end of his life, and was regarded by him as his “spiritual testament.” Taubes engages with classic Paul commentators, including Karl Barth, but also situates the Pauline text in the context of Freud, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, Scholem, and Rosenzweig. In his distinctive argument for the apocalyptic-revolutionary potential of Romans, Taubes also takes issue with the (...) “political theology” advanced by the conservative Catholic jurist Carl Schmitt. Taubes’s reading has been crucial for a number of interpretations of political theology and of Paul—including those of Jan Assmann and Giorgio Agamben—and it belongs to a wave of fresh considerations of Paul’s legacy. Finally, Taubes’s far-ranging lectures provide important insights into the singular experiences and views of this unconventional Jewish intellectual living in post-Holocaust Germany. (shrink)

I present the early, incisive reading of Hermann Cohen offered by Leo Strauss in parts of the book Philosophy and Law and in the closely related lecture “Cohen and Maimonides”, and show that that reading can help frame and sharpen our analysis of Cohen’s approach to law in both his ethics and his philosophy of Judaism.