Die exponierten Vertreter des deutsch-jüdischen Denkens tragen Spannun-gen aus, die für die Moderne kenn-zeichnend sind. Die Erfahrung des Lebens innerhalb vielfältiger, oft miteinander konfligie-render Sinnzusammenhänge, wird in diesem Denken zum Ausdruck ge-bracht. Die Forschung Paul Mendes-Flohrs widmet sich der Philosophie, der Literatur und der Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Judentums unter die-sem Aspekt. In diesem Sammelband sind Beiträge enthalten, die das deutsch-jüdische Denken und damit verwandte Themen als Prisma der Moderne betrachten.

The article traces the evolution and crystallization of Buber’s philosophy of dialogue. It focuses on his consideration of the epistemological and ontological issues attendant to the principium individuationis, the subject of his doctoral dissertation of 1904. Culminating with the publication of Ich und Du in 1923, this process was punctuated by life experiences that led him to affirm rather than to seek to transcend the principium individuationis as the ontological ground of being manifest in the matrix of everyday life, which (...) we are beckoned to sanctify through I-Thou relations. (shrink)

Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) was a German‐Jewish philosopher who became the focus of a renaissance of Jewish religious life and thought in Weimar Germany. Born into a highly assimilated Jewish family in Cassel, Germany, Rosenzweig affirmed Jewish religious faith in the midst of a philosophical and existential crisis. As a student, he was initially drawn to the neo‐Hegelianism popular in German academic circles during the first decade of the twentieth century. Although he would write his doctoral dissertation on Hegel – later (...) published with the support of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, Hegel und der Staat (1920, 2 vols) – Rosenzweig slowly lost his conviction that the dialectical providence of history would assure the ultimate convergence of truth and existence. Already in the autumn of 1910, when he was completing his dissertation under the supervision of Friedrich Meinecke, he questioned Hegel's ascription of an ontological status to history. History is not the unfolding of Being, he wrote to a friend, rather it is but the discrete acts of men. “We see God in every ethical event, but not in one complete Whole, not in history.” Indeed, history, which takes shape in the phenomenal world, cannot serve as a vessel for divinity. “Every human act becomes sinful as it enters history”; although the actors may have intended otherwise, the morality of an act is neutralized by the material world of necessity. We are hence, Rosenzweig reasoned, left with only one possible conclusion: God redeems humanity not through history but – “es bleibt nicht anders übrig” – through religion (Briefe, vol. 1, pp. 111–13). (shrink)