The question that is posed regarding the Jewish response to Hegel’s philosophy forces us to question the meaning of the adjective ‘Jewish’, and whether it points to some peculiar and distinct path and way of interpretation. I would say that in response to Hegel’s philosophy three distinguished thinkers, Samuel Hirsch, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig, responded to Hegel’s attitude toward religion and to the principles of his logic which underlie his concept of religion. Their response cannot be divorced from their (...) commitment to both an ethical and eschatological Judaism. Philosophical thinking shares religious and nonreligious categories and attitudes with theological and religious traditions, but does not employ these in similar ways. What is philosophical thinking is not necessarily theological. Although they do not necessarily relate to each other, they are not oblivious to the influence and force they have on one another. We would venture to say that in reference to Hirsch, Cohen and Rosenzweig, there was a distinct and clear attempt to confront the truth of Christianity with a truth that was believed to be superior. The first half of the nineteenth century gave us four significant Jewish thinkers who were eager and firm in their attempt to focus upon the differences in these two religions. In addition to Hirsch, they were Joseph Salvador, Salomon Formstecher, and Ludwig Steinheim. This paper, however, deals only with Hirsch and Cohen. (shrink)

In 1939, most of the thinkers and philosophers in Catalonia left their native land to evade the encroaching totalitarian forces of Franco. Thus began a long exile from which they never returned. For the first time in English, this book recounts their history and documents their impressive philosophical accomplishments.

“Daher der Schleier der Schwermut, der über die ganze Natur aufgebreitet ist, die tiefe unzerstörliche Melancolie alles Lebens.” This remark of the German idealist philosopher Schelling seems to be as ungraspable as any discussion involving God, “the ground of darkness,” and the existence of Evil. Do these questions belong only to those who are motivated by antiquarian concerns and find such interests in philosophers whose speculations take them into the “mysteries” of life, divine and human, and into those forces of (...) evil and chaos which are inseparable from love and creativity? If this is true, then Schelling is the happing hunting ground for these souls whose interests drive them to speculate and ruminate in the “deep” of the dialectic of eros and in the gnostic reflections about the positive nature of evil. But more is involved in our thinking about such philosophers as Schelling, whose System of Transcendental Idealism is one of the great works of German idealism, and this can be stated simply: with Schelling we can speak of metaphysical concerns. God, Freedom, and Evil remain the fundamental problems of speculation. We can speculate about them because our predecessors found these questions of such vitality that they identified them with philosophy. What would philosophy be without these concerns? I believe that there is no such thing as fashion in philosophy. The problems are eternal; they have been from the beginning and will be as long as philosophy is philosophy. Schelling in his Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen asked how a philosophical system was possible and answered it: “The true system cannot be discovered, it can be found already existent in the divine understanding.” There is a simple conclusion to be drawn from this: philosophy already is, it must forever be found, and we must learn to remember it. This is a notion which our Greek predecessors would never have us forget. Different from their endeavors, philosophy already has its truths; our task is to reexamine them and make them again explicable to ourselves. We need to recall that the system has already been given, “es hat lange schon ein System gegeben,” before we ever had the intention to think the system. The philosopher looks back and, different from his colleagues in the sciences and humanities, he does not seek new truths, but only attempts to develop the capacity to comprehend “old” truths, which are not old in the sense of decaying, but old as primal truths. He knows, however, that these “old” truths will always be truths not simply for him, but for all thinking men. He knows that they are “the” truths in and through which he recognizes himself as a thinking being, as philosopher, as the ground of his self-awareness. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt was a jurist, political philosopher, and a devoted student of Thomas Hobbes. Schmitt lived from 1888 to 1985 in Germany, and for a time enjoyed with Martin Heidegger the right to create under Hitler a new spiritual German state. Both men shared enduring veneration, admiring pilgrimages, and remain sources of political and philosophical discussions and interpretation. Recently, three of Schmitt’s books were added to the one already available in English, The Concept of the Political. Most of Schmitt’s books (...) are pamphlets addressing particular subjects, which were important at the time they were written. The interest we have in Schmitt today could not be easily evaluated if we were to turn to his books for historical information. He has written on topics that would interest the constitutional jurist and the political philosopher, but they are not vital books and, if lost, there would be little weeping. We write about Schmitt because we want to show the danger of every political philosophy that claims for its hypothesis scientific data. His theory of humankind is reduced to the problem of evil and his concepts of reality claim that realism, the analysis of what is, is eternally timed and fatefully structured. We read such realists with pleasure because they seem to satisfy our need to see our fellow human beings in the most dismal light. We read them with disdain because we are naturally idealistic and believe that we are condemned to no given condition, and that ideals are not absent from reality, but are the source of its evaluation and the power of its transformation. We read Hobbes and find him perceptive and insightful, for example when he tells us: “I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death”. We seem to find much that is true and valuable. There is much that is absent if we believe that people and communities have always believed that reason and the reasonable force them to find differences between the good and the evil, between the truth and the lie, between the just and the unjust. The deepest difference lies between the philosopher of reason, or the speculative philosopher, and the political thinker who refuses to draw a distinction between what exists and what should exist, i.e., the thinker who absolutizes the given and values only what is suitable to it. (shrink)

Music, art, and poetry were profound forces in Hermann Cohen’s thought. If we attempt to comprehend this philosopher, whose name is synonymous with the School of Marburg, that small charming town in Hesse from which Kant’s works and influence spread abroad like the magic of an irresistible melody, then we are forced to appreciate those lovers of music and art that brought him the friendship of the violinist Joseph Joachim, the admiration of painters such as Max Liebermann, Lenid Pasternak, the (...) father of Boris, and others whose names are now distant from us. European culture is alive in philosophy, not merely as illustrative references, but as the achievements of the mind devoted to reason and the power of imagination. This culture was not simply created by a mind that ignored the senses. The body was appreciated as the source of subtle and artistic movement, its power to build and form depended upon the grace and delicacy of the hands, sound awakened in us the inexhaustible dimension and possibilities of communication and relationship, sight the sensitivity to colors, to a variety of architectural forms that evoke a sense of beauty and sublimity by their effect and receptivity, taste and touch cultivate form and allow us to receive and be receptive with a heightened sense of delicacy and appreciation allowing form to be given to us in indescribable and unexpected ways. Through the senses we develop that intimacy with others that the mind can only define and analyze but never feel. Cohen has come forth from his detractors and even from his admirers as the distant and unapproachable “professor” of a forgotten philosophical “system.” He did his service in Kant’s army of interpreters adding volumes of interpretation and appreciation to the old master. Here he paid his dues to his profession and university. Cohen was a cultured man, a deeply sensitive individual, a fine product of artistic sensitivity and generosity. When he turned to the arts, when he moved to music, to religion, to social activity, the humaneness of his personality overcame the professor in him; it showed that tenderness for human relationship, that deep respect for love that Cohen found in his beloved Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose operas he believed reflected a sensitivity to moral and aesthetic values. (shrink)

Presents a summary of the philosophical views of French thinker Eric Weil. The major innovation of Weil's discourse is to embody absolute knowledge in the discourse of such categories as truth, discussion, object, self, God, condition, consciousness, intelligence, personality, the absolute, the unmediated particular, the finite, action, meaning, and wisdom.

Eric Weil was born in Parchim in Mechlenburg in 1904 and died in Nice in 1977. He completed his doctorate with the philosopher Ernst Cassirer in 1928 in Hamburg. In 1933 he left Germany and settled in Paris. Weil joined the French army in 1939 and was interned in 1941 as a P.O.W. He completed his French doctorate with a major thesis, La Logique de la philosophie, and a minor thesis, Hegel et l’ état. Both books have become landmarks of (...) contemporary philosophical thought. Weil, being a systematic thinker, completed the Logic with a Philosophie politique and a Philosophie morale. His other books include a volume on Kant, Problèmes kantiens, and three volumes of collected essays, Essais et conférences. If we ask what tradition Weil’s philosophy reflects, we might say that he is a thinker who ponders the discourse of philosophy from Aristotle to Hegel. He is concerned with an elaboration of those categories and attitudes which make possible the comprehension of ourselves as reasonable beings attempting to grasp the meaning of a world which we have not created, but which is receptive to reason. These categories are elaborated in the Logic of Philosophy; they embody the categories of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. They reveal the dialogue of philosophy, the continuous universal discourse of reason which defines philosophy as the determination of the concept, a determination that is expounded not only in the forward movement of thought, but also in the rethinking which is the source of philosophic movement. The encompassing achievement of Weil’s Logic of Philosophy is yet to be realized. It is one of the great monuments to systematic philosophy. In the chapter on twentieth-century philosophy in France, Yves Belaval could state, “It is still too early to appreciate the profound influence of his teaching”. (shrink)

A serious and profound discussion of some of the more important problems of modern thought, readable and truly enjoyable. Wherever the reader turns he is captivated by the originality of thought and its applicability to contemporary events. This is a unique and distinguished book well worth the reader's time.

Music, art, and poetry were profound forces in Hermann Cohen’s thought. If we attempt to comprehend this philosopher, whose name is synonymous with the School of Marburg, that small charming town in Hesse from which Kant’s works and influence spread abroad like the magic of an irresistible melody, then we are forced to appreciate those lovers of music and art that brought him the friendship of the violinist Joseph Joachim, the admiration of painters such as Max Liebermann, Lenid Pasternak, the (...) father of Boris, and others whose names are now distant from us. European culture is alive in philosophy, not merely as illustrative references, but as the achievements of the mind devoted to reason and the power of imagination. This culture was not simply created by a mind that ignored the senses. The body was appreciated as the source of subtle and artistic movement, its power to build and form depended upon the grace and delicacy of the hands, sound awakened in us the inexhaustible dimension and possibilities of communication and relationship, sight the sensitivity to colors, to a variety of architectural forms that evoke a sense of beauty and sublimity by their effect and receptivity, taste and touch cultivate form and allow us to receive and be receptive with a heightened sense of delicacy and appreciation allowing form to be given to us in indescribable and unexpected ways. Through the senses we develop that intimacy with others that the mind can only define and analyze but never feel. Cohen has come forth from his detractors and even from his admirers as the distant and unapproachable “professor” of a forgotten philosophical “system.” He did his service in Kant’s army of interpreters adding volumes of interpretation and appreciation to the old master. Here he paid his dues to his profession and university. Cohen was a cultured man, a deeply sensitive individual, a fine product of artistic sensitivity and generosity. When he turned to the arts, when he moved to music, to religion, to social activity, the humaneness of his personality overcame the professor in him; it showed that tenderness for human relationship, that deep respect for love that Cohen found in his beloved Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose operas he believed reflected a sensitivity to moral and aesthetic values. (shrink)

On January 17, 1850, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling delivered a lecture, “On the Source of Eternal Truths,” before the Academy of Science in Berlin. My purpose is to comment on this lecture and to attempt to show that wherever we read in Schelling we are faced with the same problems and confront the same insights although the subject matter changes and the organon of philosophy changes from art to mythology to revelation. It is, however, not my concern or interest to (...) enter the debate about how many “Schellings” we have; more important, I believe, is the philosophical discourse which Schelling sets forth, and the political consequences that are apparent in his philosophical position, which few commentators seem to find of significance. The political consequences of a philosophical attitude are fundamental, simply because the political problem is a philosophical one, and their unity can be denied only with serious, and at times, disastrous results. (shrink)

who is absorbed by science and medicine. This is William Kluback's seventh volume in a series of studies on Paul Valéry. This book shows how Valéry went beyond philosophy to wisdom. His achievement was so rare that we remain fascinated by his writings. We see in him a man whose constructions build bridges from one human endeavor. He is a poet who is absorbed by science and medicine.

"Paul Valery: Illusions of Civilization" opens a vast discussion of the meaning of civilization, in particular, Western civilization. It causes us to face the problems of survival, meaning, and ends. This discussion with Valery is unique - never before has such an encounter taken place. The reader is overwhelmed and challenged. The problems are presented with amazing clarity and depth.".

Where the philosopher has feared to tread, in a realm that has been declared not only non-philosophical, but anti-philosophical, this study attempts quietly to illuminate Paul Valery's reflections on literature, painting, sculpture and poetry. Professor Kluback ventures into this world of aesthetic insights which has often seemed reserved only for the artist, and off limits to the philosopher, whose explorations tend increasingly to be confined to the technicalities of logic and dialectic.".

Devoted to the art of creativity, to the analysis of the creative act, Valéry was recognized as the greatest intellectual figure of the twentieth century. This is a book of conversations, an intimate reading of texts attempting to absorb their insights, their elegance and their tones. Reading Valéry is an aesthetic experience, a feeling linking the reader to the finesse of thinking. This is the second volume of the author's Paul Valéry studies. The first volume was published by Peter Lang (...) in 1987. (shrink)

"Paul Valery: The Continuous Search for Reality" is William Kluback's fourth volume of Valery studies. The three previous volumes are: "Paul Valery: Philosophical Reflections" (Lang 1987); "Paul Valery: The Search for Intelligence" (Lang 1993); and "Paul Valery: Illusions of Civilizations" (Lang 1996). These volumes reveal a life-long dedication to one of the greatest figures of twentieth-century Western European civilization. Valery's work embraces poetry and mathematics, theatre and physics, politics and sociology.".

In the face of the Gulags and the Holocaust, of mass murder and universal deception, Paul Valery maintained his faith in rationality. In this faith of reason, he found the strength to continue his work. This study of the French poet and essayist examines his interpretation of his role as a political thinker, and the effect of Descartes on his view of Self. This is the author's sixth volume on Valery. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

With regard to the acta Dei, Fritz Marti rightly tells us that God named himself “I am,” the One who is present, adsum, the One who Acts. Could we not add that God is the One who forces us to act, whose very presence is the necessitating ground of our being? How deeply Augustine grasped this reality of being before God, how intensely he felt the desire to believe in the reality of his unbelief. “For I kept saying within myself, (...) ‘Lo, let it be now, let it be now’ ecce modo fiat, modo fiat, and as I uttered the phrase I was on the brink of resolution. I was on the point of action and I acted not and yet I did not fall back to my former state but stood hard by and drew breath. And I tried again and came a little nearer, yet a little nearer, and now I was all but touching and grasping it; and I did not reach or touch or grasp it, as I shrank from dying unto death, and from living unto life and the worse which was ingrained grew stronger in me than the better which was untrained, plusque in me valebat deterius inolitum, quam melius insolitum, and that very instant which was to make me another man struck greater terror into me, the nearer it approached; but neither repelled nor daunted me but kept me in suspense”. Before God the opposites that control our existence are felt with pain and fear, the longing to turn toward God is challenged by the forces that turn us from God, the movement toward bears within it the movement away, the escape, the need to flee and reject. How weak we discover our faith to be, how powerful we find our fear and distrust. How easily we realize the vanities of vanities, vanitates vanitatum, the childishness of our being compared to God. Deep within the experience of the “I” we see the conflicts that drive us from doubt to doubt and force us to that despair of sin that has so deeply separated us from God. The “religiosity of reason,” can it be any other than this struggle of opposites that we bear in the self and know in revelation? (shrink)

In "The Clown in the Agora," William Kluback and Michael Finkenthal have put together a book of imagined conversations, encounters, and interviews based on the poetical and philosophical ideas of playwright Eugene Ionesco.".

Insightful and fascinating studies of great men of French literature introduce the reader to that wonderful dialogue that takes place between writer and works of literature. Here we find that creative conversation which enchants the mind and forces it to become more deeply aware of its own creative reality. The discovery of the mind as a creative entity is man's most precious acquisition. This book is devoted to this creative activity.

The great philosophers defy definition. Every age, every change in the political and moral climate induces a reevaluation, gives us the possibility of a new perspective, and raises our interest in a neglected aspect of the philosopher’s thought. How deeply subject we are to time and the ambience it creates is clearly seen by the fact that we are condemned, like Sisyphus, to carry the fallen stone again and again to the top. With Hegel we are bound to imitate the (...) work of Sisyphus, believing that we have given him the proper interpretation and knowing at the same time that what we have done will necessarily be surpassed. Manfred Riedel, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Erlangen, has found, through that communicative vehicle of translation, the possibility of giving us the results of a book he published in 1969. It is a work of tantalizing scholarship that will satisfy the pleasures of those readers who delight in the philosopher’s ability to be exhaustive and exquisitely detailed as he strives for novelty and develops his thesis. The pleasures of scholarship found in this book are an exemplification of their finest products. No one can read this volume without finding a detail that he or she did not know or a definition of an Hegelian term he or she has interpreted differently or even superficially. Hegel scholars will find their master beautifully served in this volume. (shrink)

One of the most interesting developments of Kant’s philosophy was its transformation and expression in the philosophical work of the head of the Marburg School of Kant interpretation: the philosopher Hermann Cohen. We can speak of a transformation because Cohen’s last two works, The Concept of Religion in the System of Philosophy and Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, attempt to enunciate a philosophy of history rooted in the philosopher’s endeavor to discover in Jewish sources an ethic (...) and a messianic vision that could be comprehended as the consequence and fulfillment of Kant’s moral philosophy. The link that Cohen attempted to establish between Kant and Judaism implied a conviction and belief that a historical religious faith—its history and its peculiar endurance—witnessed a sense of history deeply rooted in values that posited a belief in the ought to be, in the refusal to accept as fate the what is, and was capable of structuring a vision of the future that neither rejected nor devalued the present, but placed before it a teleology that brought to clarity the struggle and confrontation that the ethic of the pure will realizes within the limitation of the historical moral situation. Cohen was a believer, having that faith in reason that has been the philosopher’s from Plato to Hegel, but this faith found embodiment not only in the love of ideas, but in the love of a people’s metahistorical history and in the moral significance which that reality bore for the history of humanity. The ideal of humanity belonged not only to its theoretical expression. Cohen assumed that the respect and admiration that Kant showed to Job was identical to the reality of the suffering and loving Israel, the suffering servanthood of God, which, if understood from an ethical perspective, would yield insights into that cosmic conflict between ignorance and reason. At the end of his essay, “What Is Orientation in Thinking,” an essay that Cohen deeply admired, Kant said. (shrink)

From the first words of this book we are informed that if we want to understand Hegel’s philosophy we should study his lecture notes, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, and that if we desire to understand Hegel’s view of Christianity, we should make the effort to comprehend the intellectual and social history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Williamson then tells us that he has divided his work into three parts. In Part I we are given the (...) necessary background material that allows us to deal intelligently with Hegel’s early religious thought. In Part II the problem of religion is integrated into the broader philosophical problems that were developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit: the dialectical process in and through which the mind evolves from consciousness to self-consciousness and, finally, to reason. Anchored in this section is the assumption that Christianity was the truth of philosophy and “that without the Christian religion, philosophy would be without true content and direction”. Part III is the speculative section where Hegel’s position is discussed from the different perspectives of atheism, pantheism, and what our author considers the more substantial position, panentheism. Williamson defines this position as “the belief that the Being of God includes and penetrates the whole universe, so that every part of it exists in Him, but that His Being is more than, and is not exhausted by, the universe”. The use of this term to describe Hegel’s position seemed appropriate because it mediated between the dualism of theism and the static identity of pantheism. (shrink)

With the deaths of Ernst Cassirer in 1945 and Eric Weil in 1977, the last of the Neo-Kantians faded from the philosophical scene. They were lonely figures in a world that had been captured by the language mysticism of Heidegger, the dialectical materialism of existentialism, and the fragmentary, aphoristic philosophies of Nietzsche, Marcel, and Buber. The system builders, who emanated from Marburg and lived in the shadows of that fierce believer in rational knowledge, Hermann Cohen, became fewer and fewer. Léon (...) Brunschwicg’s Le Progrès de la Conscience dans la philosophie Occidentale, Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, and Eric Weil’s Logique de la Philosophie were the final creations of a philosophy that recognized the discourse of reason as the perennial achievement of civilization. This discourse arose with stronger and stronger conviction and faith from every struggle with feeling and sentiment which Carl Jung called “the superstructure of brutality” and Cassirer saw embodied in the “myth of the state.” The Neo-Kantian tradition was formed around the central idea that there was a fundamental gap between what is and what should be, and this separation can be epistemologically, ethically, and aesthetically translated into a radical opposition to every Identitaetsphilosophie. (shrink)

Eight years after the publication of Philosophische Lehrjahre the English translation has appeared. The question that arises is whether the book deserved translation. What does Gadamer reward us with as we read through these biographical and autobiographical reflections? Obviously we should expect profound meditations on politics and intellectual life as Germany moved from Weimar to Hitler. At the conclusion of World War I, Ernst Troeltsch gave us his Spektator-Briefe, Karl Jaspers after World War II gave us his thoughts about guilt, (...) politics, and philosophical responsibility, and when Gadamer in 1977 produced his book, we expected similar philosophical wisdom. Gadamer had become a deeply respected figure in American philosophical circles. We honored him for his hermeneutical studies, his books on Plato, Hegel, and his insights into the relationship between rhetoric and politics. We turned to Gadamer as the new “light” of Germany from which we were convinced great philosophical ideas naturally emerged and which demanded our immediate study and respect. In Gadamer we again found our link to the German universities which we so deeply honored in the past. Sadly, this book gives us very little to honor and even less to respect. (shrink)