Rabbinic Thought between Philosophy and Literature

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue conceives Jewish Thought in broad terms to include rabbinic corpora from late antiquity to modernity in various manifestations and genres, in and beyond rabbinic institutions, in relationships to the traditions of philosophy and literature.

In a short form, the guiding question of this issue is: Where does rabbinic texts and thought belong in the unfolding history of relationships between philosophy and literature, logos and mimesis, concept and image, word and world, forgetting and remembering? These terms of the differences and connections between philosophy and literature multiply, proliferate and continuously unfold, just as the history of their relationship does.

In a regnant understanding, philosophy traditionally works in and with concepts, while literature in and with images. However, words, a seeming middle ground between concepts and images can both strive for clarity like the concepts and also remain opaque and laden with hidden regions of meaning like images. Words both enable and resist conceptual clarity, eradicate and evoke opaqueness. Traditionally, philosophy and literature went differently about words. Literature let words be, allowed for their intrinsically enigmatic/opaque, rather than transparent and obvious nature. Philosophy worked through the opaque matter of words towards the seemingly translucent meaning and spirit. So has it been: a fight for words, a struggle of “either/or” between the tradition of philosophy and that of literature. Yet a space in-between, a third ground began to emerge.

In the last and this century, both philosophy and literature renegotiated these relationships between concept, image, and word anew. That renegotiation enabled a new question: where does rabbinic thought belong in the newly charted space between traditional philosophical thinking in concepts, literary thinking in images and the currently reshaping relationships between them when it comes to words?

The aim of this issue is to address the question of where rabbinic thought belongs in this space between literature and philosophy. A variety of approaches and chronological periods are welcome. Of special interest would be analyses addressing rabbinic states and acts of mind. That means mental states and mental acts are not only described but also performed in rabbinic corpora of different periods. If noetics names the study of mental states and acts, then a particular interest of this special issue has to do with rabbinic noetics most broadly construed.

A longer term practical goal is to prepare the ground and probe approaches leading to a historical dictionary of rabbinic states and acts of mind, i.e., the dictionary of rabbinic noetics from late antiquity to modernity. Essays exploring rabbinic texts of different periods and addressing fragments, figures and practices of thought in the rabbinic corpora are thereby invited to rethink the standing of the rabbinic corpora on the horizon shaped by the currently predominant history of noetics, in the aspect of the productive tension between philosophy and literature The papers could chart a broader historical perspective and/or offer a text-based study of a term, figure or practice of thought in rabbinic and/or literary and/or philosophical corpus of a given period that relates to how rabbis understand, discuss, or perform mental states and mental acts. Contributors in noetics might consider and reconsider the additional historical contextualization in the Appendix.

Prof. Dr. Sergey Dolgopolski
Guest Editor

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