S. Daniel Breslauer – författare

This book, first published in 1990, summarizes and evaluates the contribution of Martin Buber as a theorist of myth. Buber provides explicit guidelines for understanding and evaluating myths. He describes reality as twofold: people live either in a world of things, to which they relate as a subject controlling its objects, or in a world of self-conscious others, with whom one relates as fellow subjects. Human beings require both types of reality, but also a means of moving from one to the other. Buber understands myths as one such means by which people pass from I-It reality to I-You meeting. In studying myths, he focuses on the myths in the traditions he knows best, but offers his advice and interpretation of mythology and scholarship about mythology generally.

This book summarizes and evaluates the contribution of Martin Buber as a theorist of myth. It offers a coherent and unified study focusing on Buber's approach to myth as part of his entire system of philosophy. The book analyzes whether Buber's use of myth contributes to modern appreciation of myth.

The book provides an insightful study of the Jewish theologian Martin Buber, and combines a review of the unconventional Zionism he proposed with a sensitivity to myth as the basis of an inclusive civil religion. The multifaceted nature of this work examines Buber's embrace of myth, and his application of myth to both biblical studies and political theory. It pays special attention to the way Buber's thinking about Zion applied to religious ethical issues such as ecology, education, ritual, and, as a continuing theme throughout the book, to the conflict between those Buber called Jews and Arabs in the land of Palestine.