In Discovering Levinas, Michael L. Morgan shows how this thinker faces in novel and provocative ways central philosophical problems of twentieth-century philosophy and religious thought. He tackles this task by placing Levinas in conversation with philosophers such as Donald Davidson, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Onora O'Neill, Charles Taylor, and Cora Diamond. He also seeks to understand Levinas within philosophical, religious, and political developments in the history of twentieth-century intellectual culture. Morgan demystifies Levinas by examining his unfamiliar and surprising vocabulary, interpreting (...) texts with an eye to clarity, and arguing that Levinas can be understood as a philosopher of the everyday. Morgan also shows that Levinas's ethics is not morally and politically irrelevant nor is it excessively narrow and demanding in unacceptable ways. Neither glib dismissal nor fawning acceptance, this book provides a sympathetic reading that can form a foundation for a responsible critique. (shrink)

This book provides a clear and helpful overview of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, one of the most significant and interesting philosophers of the late twentieth century. Michael L. Morgan presents an overall interpretation of Levinas' central principle that human existence is fundamentally ethical and that its ethical character is grounded in our face-to-face relationships. He explores the religious, cultural and political implications of this insight for modern Western culture and how it relates to our conception of selfhood and what (...) it is to be a person, our understanding of the ground of moral values, our experience of time and the meaning of history, and our experience of religious concepts and discourse. Includes an annotated list of recommended readings and a selected bibliography of books by and about Levinas. An excellent introduction to Levinas for readers unfamiliar with his work and even for those without a background in philosophy. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas conceives of our lives as fundamentally interpersonal and ethical, claiming that our responsibilities to one another should shape all of our actions. While many scholars believe that Levinas failed to develop a robust view of political ethics, Michael L. Morgan argues against understandings of Levinas’s thought that find him politically wanting or even antipolitical. Morgan examines Levinas’s ethical critique of the political as well as his Jewish writings—including those on Zionism and the founding of the Jewish state—which are (...) controversial reflections of Levinas’s political expression. Unlike others who dismiss Levinas as irrelevant or anarchical, Morgan is the first to give extensive treatment to Levinas as a serious social political thinker whose ethics must be understood in terms of its political implications. Morgan reveals Levinas’s political commitments to liberalism and democracy as well as his revolutionary conception of human life as deeply interconnected on philosophical, political, and religious grounds. (shrink)

Robert Stern has argued that Levinas is a kind of command theorist and that, for this reason, Løgstrup can be understood to have provided an argument against Levinas. In this paper, I discuss Levinas’s use of the vocabulary of demand, order, and command in the light of Jewish philosophical accounts of such notions in the work of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emil Fackenheim. These accounts revise the traditional Jewish idea of command and I show that Levinas’s use of this (...) vocabulary is also revisionary. I show that in light of this tradition of discussion, Levinas’s use is not susceptible to the interpretation Stern proposes and thus that the Løgstrup-style argument cannot be used against Levinas. (shrink)

The only complete edition in English of Baruch Spinoza's works, this volume features Samuel Shirley’s preeminent translations, distinguished at once by the lucidity and fluency with which they convey the flavor and meaning of Spinoza’s original texts. Michael L. Morgan provides a general introduction that places Spinoza in Western philosophy and culture and sketches the philosophical, scientific, religious, moral and political dimensions of Spinoza’s thought. Morgan’s brief introductions to each work give a succinct historical, biographical, and philosophical overview. A chronology (...) and index are included. (shrink)

The fifth edition of Michael L. Morgan's _Classics of Moral and Political Theory_ broadens the scope and increases the versatility of this landmark anthology by offering new selections from Aristotle's _Politics_, Aquinas' _Disputed Questions on Virtue_ and _Treatise on Law_, as well as the entirety of Locke's _Letter Concerning Toleration_, Kant's _To Perpetual Peace_, and Nietzsche's _On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life_.

LIKE POETS, painters, sculptors, and composers, philosophers occupy a present burgeoning with the past. From Plato to Rawls, philosophical thinking is explicitly or implicitly the outcome of encounters with imposing predecessors. The history of philosophy is, to use an expression that Gombrich applies to the history of art, a history of style, a tradition of texts that repeat, revise, and reject the conceptual tropes and argumentative patterns of precedent texts.

There is a type of history of philosophy that involves both philosophical analysis and historical understanding. in this paper i try to show how this enterprise attempts to construct a surrogate author for the texts under investigation. in order to clarify this model of interpretation, i compare the notion of surrogate author with collingwood's notion of reenactment and with nehamas's criticism of foucault's conception of authorship. i also discuss the roles of history and philosophy both as part of the internal (...) process of constructing the surrogate author and as part of the external process of critically assessing the author's thought. (shrink)

I would like to try to clarify one aspect of the relationship between Levinas’s philosophy — or “ethical metaphysics,” as Edith Wyschogrod has called it — and Judaism as Levinas understands it. In and of itself it is interesting to try to understand Levinas’s thinking and its relationship to his life as a Jew and to Judaism as he takes it to be. But I also have ulterior motives — that is, I have what some might think are larger fish (...) to fry. I will begin by saying something about Hilary Putnam’s article “Levinas and Judaism” in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, edited by Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. I think that I can indicate what those “larger fish” are by pointing to an intriguing tension in Putnam’s discussion. (shrink)

The present book contains purportedly independent studies of three classics in the history of aesthetics: Lessing's Laocoön, Kant's Critique of Judgment, and Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Savile's commentary attempts to grasp, clarify, and enrich each work's central aesthetic thesis. Savile has a consummate command of art historical materials, but here the art historian takes a back seat to the textual interpreter. The reason for this is Savile's belief that these texts are in need of philosophical reconstruction. The (...) texts present "genuine philosophical challenge[s]," since "the arguments... have to be laboriously retrieved from materials that are for the most part to hand but only dimly visible". (shrink)

"MIchael Morgan has served up an intellectual treat. These subtle and carefully reasoned essays explore the dilemmas of the post-modern Jew who would take history seriously without losing the commanding presence Israel heard at Sinai.... It is a pleasure to be nourished by a fresh mind exploring the tension between reason and revelation, history and faith."—Rabbi Samuel Karff "This is without doubt one of the most significant works in modern Jewish thought and a must for a thoughtful student of contemporary (...) Jewish philosophy." —Rabbie Sheldon Zimmerman "This may well mark the next stage in the long history of Jewish self-understanding." —Ethics "... rigorous history of modern Jewish thought... " —Choice Is Judaism a timeless, universal set of beliefs or, rather, is it historical and contingent in its relation to different times and places? Morgan clarifies the tensions and dilemmas that characterize modern thinking about the nature of Judaism and clears the way for Jews to appreciate their historical situation, yet locate enduring values and principles in a post-Holocaust world. (shrink)

Today, texts are the centerpiece of intellectual life, and it is no different in philosophy. Thirty years ago, the subjects of the history of philosophy were the arguments of dead philosophers about perennial problems. Today, greater attention is paid to the texts that such figures wrote—why they wrote them, their genre, form, style, and how we now might read them. In analytic philosophy, this attention to form and its relation to meaning is revolutionary.

That the immediate forebears of Descartes, the "Father of Modern Philosophy," were not the victims of parricide is generally acknowledged. It is a disputed question, however, whether Descartes's fatherhood amounts in its essentials to a continuation of the bloodline of late scholasticism. The traditional view is that Descartes's is a thoroughgoing but also somewhat mediated modernity, as D'Alembert's "Discours préliminaire" to the Encyclopédie attests. D'Alembert, speaking for several generations of readers, had no doubts about Descartes's debt to scholastic theology. However, (...) he also argued that it was Francis Bacon who was the true "father of lights." Rousseau, for all his differences with D'Alembert, seems to have agreed with him on that point at least. Against those who would downplay the novelty of modernity, and in keeping with this traditional assessment of its origin, Robert Faulkner urges a careful reconsideration of the work of philosophy's only Lord Chancellor. Faulkner's intention is not merely to set the historical record straight, however. As he states at the outset, he hopes more generally "to contribute to efforts at prudent discrimination and philosophic rethinking" of modernity as we now live it. Reading Bacon is for Faulkner an exercise in self-understanding. (shrink)

This brief volume, one of the Past Masters series, is a fascinating introduction to the full range of Thomas Hobbes's philosophy. The book has three parts. In the first Tuck describes Hobbes's life and gives a "brief, synoptic view of Hobbes's philosophy" as it develops in the context of sixteenth-century history and thought. The second part discusses Hobbes's arguments on science, ethics, politics, and religion. Finally, Tuck surveys a variety of styles of Hobbes interpretation, from Hobbes's contemporaries to our own (...) today. (shrink)

This picture of philosophy and politics harbors as much caricature as accuracy. Even in Plato, who is often cited as its earliest author, the contrast occurs less sharply. Arguably Plato never saw philosophy as wholly transcendent, nor politics as wholly empirical, even in the Republic. But the Western tradition has rarely appreciated the nuance in Plato. The radical contrast has a long and influential history with at least one useful result, that the question of the relationship between philosophy and politics (...) is frequently brought vividly to our attention. (shrink)

The philosophy of mind is an especially flourishing plot of philosophical terrain these days. In part this activity derives from the quality of the work and in part from the topic's location, at the intersection of science--computer science, mathematics, biology, and cognitive psychology--and metaphysics and epistemology, even ethics. If recent developments date from Ryle and his iconoclasm, the modern study of mind has an older provenance in the writings of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, and other figures whose work coincided (...) with the rise of the new science, the fragmentation of religious hegemony, and the recovery of ancient traditions. In this period, of special importance to the treatment of human experience and mental phenomena was the retrieval of Epicurean and Stoic texts and ideas. It is, therefore, an opportune moment to have a sophisticated and comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of mind of the ancient Stoics and Epicureans. In this book, Julia Annas has provided just that. (shrink)

Confronting the challenges of the 20th century, from modernity and the Great War to the Holocaust and postmodern culture, Jewish thinkers have wrestled with such fundamental issues as redemption and revelation, eternity and history, messianism and politics. From the turn of the century through the 1920s, European Jewish intellectuals confronted alienation and the challenges of modernity by seeking secure grounds for a meaningful life. After the Holocaust and the fall of Nazism, the rich results of their thinking—on topics such as (...) transcendence, redemption, revelation, and politics—were reinterpreted in an atmosphere of increasing disillusion and fragmentation. In Interim Judaism, Michael L. Morgan traces the evolution of this shift in values, as expressed in the work of social thinkers, novelists, artists, and poets as well as philosophers and theologians at the beginning and end of the century. Focusing on the problem of objectivity, the experience of the transcendent, and the relationship between redemption and politics, he argues that the outcome for contemporary Jews is a pragmatic style of religiosity that has abandoned traditional conceptions of Judaism and is searching and waiting for new ones, a condition that he describes as "interim Judaism." Published with the generous support of Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati. (shrink)

Against the background of the current interest in hermeneutics and interpretation theory, the title of Booth's book might lead one to expect a post-Nietzschean reading of Kant's philosophy of history and politics. But the actual source of the book's title is Marx's final thesis on Feuerbach. Booth gives us a sceptical, realistic Kant who faces the shortcomings of reason and the challenges of the natural world not by trying to change the world but rather by seeking interpretations of it that (...) enable man to cope with nature and orient his life amid the trials and difficulties that beset him. Booth's Kant is not so Hegelian as to seek a kind of transcendence that accepts the world only to encompass it in an act of self-conscious reflection; nor is he so Marxist as to settle optimistically for nothing less than changing the world. Rather he is more Stoic or Spinozist; he recognizes various interpretive standpoints that serve different human purposes and advocates an orientation for human experience that is rooted in human freedom, rationality, and courageous resolve. (shrink)

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the concept of community was associated with an ideal society or polity; a host of figures conceived of redemption as the creation and development of community. In this paper, I briefly discuss how this ideal was appropriated by Martin Buber and how genuine community came to mean, for him, a society organized in terms of a collection of I-Thou oriented relationships. I then consider how the same ideal might help us to understand (...) the social and historical ideal which Franz Rosenzweig takes to be the redemptive ideal of Judaism and the Jewish people. (shrink)

This paper attempts to develop the foundations of a contemporary Jewish moral theory. It treats the Jewish legal and moral tradition as the object of an act of interpretive recovery that is carried out by contemporary Jews who are sensitive to the demands of their historical situation, a situation defined by the Nazi destruction of European Jewry and by the reestablishment of the Jewish state. In the course of the paper I develop an approach to post-Holocaust Jewish experience that derives (...) from the work of Emil Fackenheim and try to show how Jewish moral imperatives arise within Fackenheim's account of the Jewish situation. The Jew's understanding of the role of God in moral obligation, his appreciation of the demands of the historical moment, and his interpretive recovery of the Jewish moral tradition-all are shown to depend upon and emerge from a reflective examination of Jewish moral and legal resistance during the Holocaust. (shrink)

I would like to try to clarify one aspect of the relationship between Levinas’s philosophy — or “ethical metaphysics,” as Edith Wyschogrod has called it — and Judaism as Levinas understands it. In and of itself it is interesting to try to understand Levinas’s thinking and its relationship to his life as a Jew and to Judaism as he takes it to be. But I also have ulterior motives — that is, I have what some might think are larger fish (...) to fry. I will begin by saying something about Hilary Putnam’s article “Levinas and Judaism” in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, edited by Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. I think that I can indicate what those “larger fish” are by pointing to an intriguing tension in Putnam’s discussion. (shrink)

Both as historian and as theoretician, Quentin Skinner has contributed brilliantly to our understanding of the tradition of political thinking and to the renewed interest in a genuinely historical reading of the texts of that tradition. Until now, however, Skinner's methodological articles have not been conveniently available under one cover. James Tully's excellent volume remedies that deficiency. Tully brings together five of Skinner's most important writings on interpretation, his own fine introduction to Skinner's work, seven essays by critics, and a (...) long reply by Skinner, in which he responds to virtually all the criticisms of his work that have appeared in print. No one seriously interested in intellectual history, the history of philosophy, or the history of political thought can afford to miss this book. (shrink)