Negotiating the relation between divine transcendence and divine immanence lies at the heart of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed and of Kierkegaard's philosophical works. The purpose of the paper is to explore the manners in which they do so. I argue that despite various differences between them, both engage with the tension between divine transcendence and immanence by turning away from objectivity to subjectivity and, moreover, by placing paradox, riddle and secret at the heart of their philosophical works. In other (...) words, I argue that they do not attempt to solve or dissolve the great paradox of God's immanent transcendence but to present it in its most acute forms as the paradox within which the religious life is lived. (shrink)

Neither art nor philosophy was kind to beauty during the twentieth century. Much modern art disdains beauty, and many philosophers deeply suspect that beauty merely paints over or distracts us from horrors. Intellectuals consigned the passions of beauty to the margins, replacing them with the anemic and rarefied alternative, "aesthetic pleasure." In Only a Promise of Happiness, Alexander Nehamas reclaims beauty from its critics. He seeks to restore its place in art, to reestablish the connections among art, beauty, and desire, (...) and to show that the values of art, independently of their moral worth, are equally crucial to the rest of life.Nehamas makes his case with characteristic grace, sensitivity, and philosophical depth, supporting his arguments with searching studies of art and literature, high and low, from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Manet's Olympia to television. Throughout, the discussion of artworks is generously illustrated.Beauty, Nehamas concludes, may depend on appearance, but this does not make it superficial. The perception of beauty manifests a hope that life would be better if the object of beauty were part of it. This hope can shape and direct our lives for better or worse. We may discover misery in pursuit of beauty, or find that beauty offers no more than a tantalizing promise of happiness. But if beauty is always dangerous, it is also a pressing human concern that we must seek to understand, and not suppress. (shrink)

For much of its history, philosophy was not merely a theoretical discipline but a way of life, an "art of living." This practical aspect of philosophy has been much less dominant in modernity than it was in ancient Greece and Rome, when philosophers of all stripes kept returning to Socrates as a model for living. The idea of philosophy as an art of living has survived in the works of such major modern authors as Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Each of (...) these writers has used philosophical discussion as a means of establishing what a person is and how a worthwhile life is to be lived. In this wide-ranging, brilliantly written account, Alexander Nehamas provides an incisive reevaluation of Socrates' place in the Western philosophical tradition and shows the importance of Socrates for Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Why does each of these philosophers—each fundamentally concerned with his own originality—return to Socrates as a model? The answer lies in the irony that characterizes the Socrates we know from the Platonic dialogues. Socratic irony creates a mask that prevents a view of what lies behind. How Socrates led the life he did, what enabled or inspired him, is never made evident. No tenets are proposed. Socrates remains a silent and ambiguous character, forcing readers to come to their own conclusions about the art of life. This, Nehamas shows, is what allowed Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault to return to Socrates as a model without thereby compelling them to imitate him. This highly readable, erudite study argues for the importance of the tradition within Western philosophy that is best described as "the art of living" and casts Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault as the three major modern representatives of this tradition. Full of original ideas and challenging associations, this work will offer new ways of thinking about the philosophers Nehamas discusses and about the discipline of philosophy itself. (shrink)

Argues that Nietzsche tried to create a specific literary character in his writings and discusses the paradoxes of his work.

The aim of interpretation is to capture the past in the future: to capture, not to recapture, first, because the iterative prefix suggests that meaning, which was once manifest, must now be found again. But the postulated author dispenses with this assumption. Literary texts are produced by very complicated actions, while the significance of even our simplest acts is often far from clear. Parts of the meaning of a text may become clear only because of developments occurring long after its (...) composition. And though the fact that an author means something may be equivalent to the fact that a writer could have meant it, this is not to say that the writer did, on whatever level, actually mean it.Alexander Nehamas, professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, has written articles on ancient Greek philosophy, literary theory, Nietzsche and Thomas Mann. (shrink)

The paper explores the nature and role of divine transcendence in Maimonides by focusing on the figure of Job as he is understood by him. In the first part, I discuss Maimonides’ diagnosis of Job’s suffering. In the second, I focus on Maimonides’ analysis of the nature of its defeat, and the manners in which that defeat involves the mediation of divine transcendence and hiddenness. In the third, I discuss some of the difficulties involved within the picture presented in the (...) second part, namely, Maimonides’ seeming commitment to two incompatible conceptions of divine transcendence. I argue that the incompatible accounts need not be harmonized since the Guide of the Perplexed is not a textbook that attempts to provide a doctrine concerning the nature of divine transcendence and its relation to the world. Rather, its purpose is to present a riddle, the great riddle of divine transcendence, around which Jewish life, as he understands it, is built. This riddle, for Maimonides, cannot be solved or dissolved; rather, it has to be recognized and embraced. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for a new conception of religious justifications which takes the performance of miracles as the paradigm of reasoning in religion. The paper has two parts: In the first part, I argue against Swinburne’s parity argument for the existence of God by showing that religious perceptions fit more comfortably among aspect perceptions, e.g., the perceptions of beauty and courage, than among our perceptions of objects and colors. In the second part of the paper I employ the (...) analogy between seeing God and seeing beauty and the moral features of an act to propose a performative and transformative conception of religious reasoning. I argue that an argument in religion is a performance which brings various facts or events into life in a particular manner, so that God may be seen in or through them. Any such performance through which God is seen may be properly called a "miracle". Thus, the performance of miracles, i.e., of acts that are directed at becoming the vehicles throu. (shrink)

Believers regularly refer to God as “forgiving and merciful” when praying for divine forgiveness. If one is committed to divine immutability and impassability, as Maimonides is, one must deny that God is capable, in principle, of acting in a forgiving manner. If one rejects divine impassability, maintaining that God has a psychology, as Muffs does, one must reckon with biblical depictions of divine vengeance and rage. Such depictions suggest that while being capable, in principle, of acting in a forgiving way, (...) God has a difficulty to manage God’s anger and do so in practice. Employing a Wittgensteinian perspective, I argue that utterances, e.g., “God merciful and gracious, slow to anger. . . forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin”, need not be understood as involving mistaken or confused descriptions of God’s nature and manner of acting. Rather, they can be understood as speech-acts of various types and functions: mystical, theurgic and others, that purport to bring about or transform various states of affairs in this world and/or beyond it. As such, they can function as non-semantic instruments that purport to elevate the believer to the “upper worlds”, or as anger-management devices that purport to help God implement His second order desire to act in a forgiving manner, despite His difficulty to do so. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the question of the existence of moral dilemmas, conceived of as situations involving a subject in a conflict of non‐overridden moral obligations. I reject some of the presuppositions underlying discussions of this question and argue that certain morally relevant choices cannot be evaluated in relation to an all‐things‐considered moral obligation as permissible or impermissible, right or wrong. In arguing for the inadequacy of our ordinary moral predicates for fully capturing the nature of such choices, I (...) argue that they are, in certain respects, inexpressible. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of forgiveness ordinarily emphasize three components: i) the overcoming of hostile emotions toward the wrongdoer; ii) a change of heart toward the wrongdoer, which goes beyond the cessation of hostile emotions and involves the acquisition of a more positive attitude toward him or her; iii) a willingness to restore the relationship and proceed toward reconciliation. In this paper, I examine these three presumed components, endorsing the first but rejecting the second and the third as unnecessary features of forgiveness. (...) I thus argue that forgiveness is, first and foremost, a unilateral, intra-psychic process that does not necessarily lead to reconciliation or to the fostering of friendly relations. The paper has three parts. In the first part, I argue that overcoming resentment toward one’s assailant by coming to view oneself more favourably lies at the core of forgiveness. In the second part, I show that one need not be able to view one’s assailant in a different and more favourable light to be able to overcome one’s resentment and forgive one’s assailant. Furthermore, in the third part, I argue that a wholly negative view of the wrongdoer, moral hatred and a refusal to be reconciled with him or her are compatible with forgiving him or her. (shrink)

The paper explores the manners in which suffering, both natural and moral suffering, is understood and defeated in the lives of different ‘knights of faith,’ who emerge in ‘conversation’ with the book of Job. I begin with Maimonides’ Job who emerges as a ‘knight of wisdom’; it is through wisdom that his suffering is defeated, dissolving into mere pain. I proceed with Kierkegaard’s Job, who emerges as a ‘knight of loving trust,’ who defeats suffering by seeing it as a divine (...) gift, and by obediently and lovingly accepting it as such. Through his loving trust, suffering transforms into blessedness and joy, without diminishing or disappearing, a transformation referred to as a ‘miracle’ by Kierkegaard. I end with my own Hasidic-inspired Job, whom I portray as a ‘knight of protest,’ who defeats what he takes to be divine abuse by protesting against it, forgiving God while refusing to be reconciled with Him. I argue that it is by paying attention to these diverse Jobs that the complex nature of faith can be elucidated. Moreover, I argue that all three Jobs, despite their differences, may be embraced, both from a philosophically descriptive perspective as well as from a religiously committed one. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to bring together two thinkers that are concerned with the limits of what can be said, Wittgenstein and Maimonides, and to explore the sense of the good life and of the mystical to which their therapeutic linguistic work gives rise. I argue that despite the similarities, two different senses of the "mystical" are brought to light and two different "forms of life" are explicated and recommended. The paper has three parts. In the first part, (...) I discuss certain key components in Wittgenstein’s early philosophy and the sense of the mystical to which they give rise. In the second part, I discuss Maimonides’ negative theology and its implications for his conception of the ’via mystica’. I end, with a discussion of the relation between the two ideals and its significance. (shrink)

Nietzsche often gives the impression that all human beliefs are false. Some scholars, like Maudemarie Clark, believe that such a “falsification thesis” is unacceptable and try to limit Nietzsche's commitment to it, claiming that he abandons it in his very last works. Others, like Lanier Anderson and Nadeem Hussain, take it in ways that make it true and locate it in all. I argue that the view that is common to both approaches—that Nietzsche held that thesis in the first place—is (...) unjustified. To that end, I interpret the texts where these scholars claim to find the thesis in a way that shows that they do not commit Nietzsche to it, and I offer some reasons for thinking that this is a more fruitful way of interpreting his views on the importance of truth—and falsehood—and their function in the economy of human life. (shrink)

In September 2017 Alexander Nehamas kindly accepted our invitation to have a meeting in Athens in order to discuss several issues of philosophical interest; with his latest publication On Friendship as a starting point we soon moved over to a multitude of topics Nehamas has so far dealt with. The whole conversation spirals around the probably most challenging and demanding issue as far as practical philosophy is concerned – yet one every moral agent needs to provide an adequate answer to (...) during his lifetime: Values. Do they exclusively belong to the domain of morality? Nehamas claims that “although moral values […] are important […], they are not the only values that determine whether a life is or is not worthwhile”. This view inevitably shifts the focus from individual values - even fundamental ones such as friendship, art and truth- to the real issue: What is a good life, after all? (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the centrality of aspect seeing in Wittgenstein's philosophy, with some analogies between religious beliefs and aspect seeing, and with the implications of these analogies for the question of the justification of religious beliefs. If belief in God is neither a hypothesis nor a regular perceptual belief but rather a type of aspect seeing, then the kinds of proofs and justifications that are applicable to it would have to engage the non-believer in a manner that would (...) help her experience the dawning of a new aspect. This is why the standard philosophical proofs for theism, even when accepted as valid, are likely to be unsuccessful in bringing about faith. (shrink)

A LARGE NUMBER OF PEOPLE, ancient and modern alike, have always found in Socrates what seemed to them a suspicious, if not actually repugnant, aspect. This aspect, to put the point first in crude terms, is his devotion to philosophy, which presupposes an apparently unshakable faith in reason, in the power of understanding to secure goodness, and in the power of goodness to provide us with happiness.

In the field of philosophy, Plato's view of rhetoric as a potentially treacherous craft has long overshadowed Aristotle's view, which focuses on rhetoric as an independent discipline that relates in complex ways to dialectic and logic and to ethics and moral psychology. This volume, composed of essays by internationally renowned philosophers and classicists, provides the first extensive examination of Aristotle's Rhetoric and its subject matter in many years. One aim is to locate both Aristotle's treatise and its subject within the (...) more general context of his philosophical treatment of other disciplines, including moral and political theory as well as poetics. The contributors also seek to illuminate the structure of Aristotle's own conception of rhetoric as presented in his treatise. The first section of the book, which deals with the arguments of rhetoric, contains essays by M. F. Burnyeat and Jacques Brunschwig. A section treating the status of the art of rhetoric features pieces by Eckart Schütrumpf, Jürgen Sprute, M. M. McCabe, and Glenn W. Most. Essays by John M. Cooper, Stephen Halliwell, and Jean-Louis Labarrière address topics related to rhetoric, ethics, and politics. The final section, on rhetoric and literary art, comprises essays by Alexander Nehamas and André Laks. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Nietzsche sometimes writes as if we are not in control—at least not in conscious control—of our actions. He seems to suggest that what we actually do is independent of our intentions. It turns out, though, that his understanding of both intention and action differs radically from most contemporary treatments of the issue. In particular, he denies that our actions are caused by their intentions, whose role is hermeneutical in a sense that this essay develops. How then is responsibility to be (...) assigned, since its moral variety, at least, depends, on several views, on the intention with which an action is performed? Nietzsche, of course, is not interested in making attributions of moral responsibility. Still, his views on the relationship between an individual action, its intention, other actions by its agent, and the agent's character, as this essay presents them, provide a reasonable account of action generally and a different, broader account of responsibility for oneself. (shrink)

Problems with representing friendship in painting and the novel and its more successful displays in drama reflect the fact that friends seldom act as inspiringly as traditional images of the relationship suggest: friends' activities are often trivial, commonplace and boring, sometimes even criminal. Despite all that, the philosophical tradition has generally considered friendship a moral good. I argue that it is not a moral good, but a good nonetheless. It provides opportunities to try different ways of being, and is crucial (...) to the processes through which we establish our individuality. (shrink)

This paper offers an interpretation of self-Predication (the idea that justice is just) in plato, Given that self-Predication is accepted as obvious both by plato and by his audience, Which entails that "all" self-Predications are clearly, Though not trivially, True. More strongly, It is suggested that "only" self-Predications can be accepted as clearly true by plato. This is to deny that plato had at his disposal an articulated notion of predication, And his middle theory of forms, Primarily the relation of (...) participation, Is seen as his attempt to arrive at that notion. It is argued that his metaphysical and semantical views are heavily influenced by eleatic monism. But this monism is incompatible with the very idea of predication. It is only in his later works, Where he attacks parmenides directly, That plato manages to lay the groundwork for what can be considered as the discovery of predication. (shrink)

It is said that when Socrates is made to ask questions like "What is the pious and what the impious?", "What is courage?", or "What is the beautiful?", he is asking for the definition of a universal. For the "average" Greek of his time, however, this is a radically new question about a radically new sort of object, and Socrates’ interlocutors do not understand it. They usually answer it as if it were a different, if related, question: they tend to (...) provide concrete instances of the universal in question rather than a definition, however inadequate, of the universal itself. Socrates always tries, but does not always succeed, to make himself clear: Meno, for example, is supposed never to get the point. (shrink)