Maimonides Library for Philosophy and Religion – serie

Gustav Landauer was an unconventional anarchist who aspired to a return to a communal life. His antipolitical rejection of authoritarian assumptions is based on a radical linguistic scepticism that could be considered the theoretical premise of his anarchism. The present volume aims to add to the existing scholarship on Landauer by shedding new light on his work, focussing on the two interrelated notions of skepsis and antipolitics. In a time marked by a deep doubt concerning modern politics, Landauer’s alternative can help us to more seriously address the struggle for a different articulation of our communitarian and ecological needs.

This book focuses on Isaac Albalag’s perspective on the relationship between religion and philosophy. In Sefer Tiqqun ha-Deʿot, a Hebrew translation with a commentary of al-Ġazālī’s Arabic philosophical encyclopedia Maqāṣid al-Falāsifah, Albalag indicates his adherence to what is known in scholarship as the double-truth doctrine. By analysing the Tiqqun against its philosophical background and its critical engagement with the Maqāṣid, this book demonstrates Albalag’s unyielding commitment to Aristotelianism, as known to him through Averroes’s lens, concluding that his apparent embrace of the double-truth doctrine is merely a strategic tool to carve out a distinct space for philosophy, independent of religious beliefs.

The Andalusian Muslim philosopher Averroes (1126–1198) is known for his authoritative commentaries on Aristotle and for his challenging ideas about the relationship between philosophy and religion, and the place of religion in society. Among Jewish authors, he found many admirers and just as many harsh critics. This volume brings together, for the first time, essays investigating Averroes’s complex reception, in different philosophical topics and among several Jewish authors, with special attention to its relation to the reception of Maimonides. Pablo Dreizik, Professor of Philosophy at the University in Buenos Aires, has featured this volume in a radio presentation on Radio Sefarad, which represents the voice of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain. The presentation is available here for all interested: Radio Sefarad

The present volume contains articles based on papers delivered at the two international conferences organized as part of the Between Two Worlds research project in 2017 and 2019. Obadiah Sforno was an influential Jewish thinker of sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance, whose religious and exegetical authority has had an enduring legacy. The collected essays offer an unprecedented and much desired overview of his life and thought with an emphasis on the neglected philosophical dimension of his oeuvre, as seen in both his biblical commentaries and his sole philosophical treatise Light of the Nations.

Does God Doubt? shows that Rabbi Gershon Henoch Leiner of Radzin considered God to be revealed as doubt. Thus, according to this profound and important nineteenth-century Hasidic leader, doubt is an essential aspect of the human condition, and especially of religious life. His position is shown to be remarkably bold and unique compared to kabbalistic writing, and especially to the Hasidic worlds to which he belonged. At the same time, the roots of his thought are located in earlier discussions of doubt as one of the highest parts of the divine world. Doubt about, in, and of God is part of the Hasidic contribution to modernity.

Much of the most recent research on Jewish scepticism was inspired by the work of the early modern Venetian rabbi Simone Luzzatto, the first thinker in the history of Jewish thought to declare himself a sceptic and a follower of the New Academy. This collected volume shines new light on the intimate relationship between Luzzatto’s sceptical thinking and an era marked by paradoxes and contrasts between religious devotion and scientific rationalism, as well as between the rabbinic-biblical Jewish tradition and the open tendency towards engagement with non-Jewish philosophical, literary, scientific, and theological cultures. It plots out an original path along which to understand Luzzatto’s scepticism by pointing to the various facets of being a Jewish sceptic in seventeenth-century Italy.

Richard H. Popkin (1923–2005) was a pioneer in the field of Jewish studies. His numerous books and articles broke new ground in the study of Jewish-Christian relations in the early modern period and in the exploration of the impact of Jews and Judaism on philosophy and religious thought. A Sceptical Jew: Richard H. Popkin’s Private Republic of Letters brings together selections from Popkin’s private correspondence and other documents to illuminate the sources of his interests and the nature of his contributions to the fields in which he worked.