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Contemporary Continental Philosophy and Jewish Thought
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Contemporary Continental Philosophy and Jewish Thought

A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 July 2022) | Viewed by 17337

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Richard A. Cohen

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Jewish Thought, University at Buffalo (SUNY), Buffalo, NY 14260, USA
Interests: ethics; political philosophy; Levinas; contemporary and modern continental philosophy
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to solicit your contribution to a Special Issue of the international journal “Religions,” which I have been invited to edit, on the topic of “Contemporary Continental Philosophy and Jewish Thought.”   “Contemporary Continental Philosophy” comprises all post-Kantian/Hegelian philosophy, including, but not limited to, Marxism, phenomenology, structuralism, critical theory, gender studies, critical race theory and postmodernism.  “Jewish Thought” is conceived broadly to include all major Jewish thinkers, medieval, modern and contemporary, and Jewish inter-textuality from the Bible, Talmud and commentaries, to today’s varied theories, practices and literary works, as also Zionism and Holocaust studies.     

It is hoped that contributors will draw attention to real and possible influences, cross pollinations and intersections, in multiple directions, between philosophy, spirituality, traditional practice, ethics and literary developments.  For instance, to explore comparisons and contrasts between Buber’s thought and Hassidism, or between Levinas’s ethics and phenomenology and the discussions and stories of Talmud.  Or to discover Jewish sources for Bergson’s conception of duration, or in the writings of Franz Kafka, or for Leo Strauss’s opposition between reason and revelation, or non-Jewish influences on post-Holocaust Judaisms.      

Not another exercise in the ageless battle between ancients and moderns, this Special Issue anticipates the discovery of fresh connections, novel interfaces, real and potential intellectual, spiritual and ethical partnerships and cross-fertilizations, of mutually fructifying conjunctions linking contemporary continental philosophy and Jewish thought, without effacing essential differences.    

Prof. Dr. Richard A. Cohen
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • philosophy
  • reason
  • revelation
  • redemption
  • God
  • monotheism
  • Bible Criticism
  • ethics
  • orthodoxy
  • law
  • Talmud
  • enlightenment
  • phenomenology
  • mitzvah
  • commandments
  • ritual
  • Bible
  • prayer
  • Torah
  • Halakah

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Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

15 pages, 260 KiB  
Article
Levinas and Responsibility in the Face of Violence: A View from Lithuania
by Jolanta Saldukaitytė
Religions 2022, 13(2), 185; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13020185 - 21 Feb 2022
Viewed by 3294
Abstract
This paper is an exploration of the possibility of responsibility in the face of violence. Invoking choices made within the Holocaust experience, the paper shows how, from Levinas’ perspective, morality and humanity are tested. First, violence interrupts a person’s integrity and forces upon [...] Read more.
This paper is an exploration of the possibility of responsibility in the face of violence. Invoking choices made within the Holocaust experience, the paper shows how, from Levinas’ perspective, morality and humanity are tested. First, violence interrupts a person’s integrity and forces upon him/her choices he/she would otherwise not make. Second, war as the ultimate form of violence alleges the introduction of a “new morality” to justify its atrocities. Yet, this is belied because morality cannot be defined solely by ontology or epistemology and needs to account for vulnerability and passivity. Recognizing that moral responsibility is conjoined with vulnerability reveals it to be deeper than the logic promulgated by war. This is confirmed by an analysis of Cain’s question, which shows that evil arises by ignoring the face of the other, by a secondary effort to displace the primacy of being for-the-other. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Continental Philosophy and Jewish Thought)
15 pages, 228 KiB  
Article
Judaism, Enlightenment, and Ideology
by Randi Lynn Rashkover
Religions 2022, 13(1), 15; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13010015 - 24 Dec 2021
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2567
Abstract
The co-existence of Enlightenment and ideology has long vexed Jews in modernity. They have both loved and been leary of Enlightenment reason and its attending scientific and political institutions. Jews have also held a complex relationship to ideological forms that exist alongside Enlightenment [...] Read more.
The co-existence of Enlightenment and ideology has long vexed Jews in modernity. They have both loved and been leary of Enlightenment reason and its attending scientific and political institutions. Jews have also held a complex relationship to ideological forms that exist alongside Enlightenment reason and which have both lured and victimized them alike. Still, what accounts for this historical proximity between Enlightenment and ideology? and how does this relationship factor into the emergence of modern anti-Semitism? Can Jewish communities participate in contemporary societies committed to scientific developments and deliberative democracies and neither be targeted by totalizing systems of thought that eliminate Judaism’s difference nor fall prey to the power and seduction of ideological forces that compete with the Jewish life-world? This article argues that Hegel’s discussion of the Enlightenment in the Phenomenology of Spirit as a social practice of critical common sensism provides an immanent critique of Max Horkheimer’s and Theodore Adorno’s analysis of the absolutism of the Enlightenment that can bolster Jewish communal and philosophical hope in the commensurability between Judaism and the contemporary expressions of Enlightenment reason, even if it does not fully eradicate the challenges presented by ideology for Jewish communities and thinkers. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Continental Philosophy and Jewish Thought)
8 pages, 250 KiB  
Article
So Near, So Far: Emmanuel Levinas and Vladimir Jankélévitch
by Joëlle Hansel
Religions 2021, 12(11), 922; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12110922 - 22 Oct 2021
Viewed by 2286
Abstract
The purpose of my article is to shed light on the relationship of proximity and distance that linked two major figures of 20th-century French philosophy: Emmanuel Levinas and Vladimir Jankélévitch. This article presents a comparative study of their respective views on Metaphysics and [...] Read more.
The purpose of my article is to shed light on the relationship of proximity and distance that linked two major figures of 20th-century French philosophy: Emmanuel Levinas and Vladimir Jankélévitch. This article presents a comparative study of their respective views on Metaphysics and Ethics. It also deals with their contribution to the reflection on the fact of “Being Jewish”, the theme that was at the center of the preoccupations of these two artisans of the renewal of Jewish thought in France after the Shoah. I conduct a comparative analysis between the key concepts of their philosophy: Levinas’ “There is” and “Otherness” and Jankélévitch’s “I-know-not-what” and “Ipseity”. I point out the difference between Levinas’ ethics of Otherness and Jankélévitch’s morality of paradox. In the section on “Being Jewish”, I highlight the crucial distinction they both made between racism and anti-Semitism and the very different meaning they gave to it. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Continental Philosophy and Jewish Thought)
12 pages, 254 KiB  
Article
Emmanuel Levinas and Ethical Materialism
by Jolanta Saldukaitytė
Religions 2021, 12(10), 870; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12100870 - 13 Oct 2021
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3195
Abstract
The article discusses concrete and material aspects of Levinas’s ethical metaphysics. Firstly, the paper shows that, in contrast to several alternative modern conceptions of subjectivity, the Levinasian subject is not at a safe distance from the world but involved in it through sensing [...] Read more.
The article discusses concrete and material aspects of Levinas’s ethical metaphysics. Firstly, the paper shows that, in contrast to several alternative modern conceptions of subjectivity, the Levinasian subject is not at a safe distance from the world but involved in it through sensing and “enjoyment” and therefore vulnerability. After that the paper highlights the materiality and concreteness of Levinas’s ethical metaphysics, a “deformalization” radically opposed to abstractness. It is precisely owing to the transcendence of the Other that the face is always concrete, always a specific, concrete, material solicitation of aid. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Continental Philosophy and Jewish Thought)
10 pages, 728 KiB  
Article
And G-d Created Wife: How Did the Modern Other Emerge?
by Sergey Dolgopolski
Religions 2021, 12(10), 863; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12100863 - 12 Oct 2021
Viewed by 1861
Abstract
Asking the question of the emergence of the modern other, the paper explores the inversion of relationships between wife and woman, husband and man in an archeological analysis of a Talmudic reading by Emmanuel Levinas “And God Created Woman.” The theoretical framework of [...] Read more.
Asking the question of the emergence of the modern other, the paper explores the inversion of relationships between wife and woman, husband and man in an archeological analysis of a Talmudic reading by Emmanuel Levinas “And God Created Woman.” The theoretical framework of inquiry focuses on the development of relationships between the human on the one hand and the thinking and acting subject on the other. The guiding question is that of defining modern subjectivity by the disappearance of rabbinic discourse from its horizon. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Continental Philosophy and Jewish Thought)
11 pages, 236 KiB  
Article
Philosophy and Kabbalah. Elia Benamozegh (1823–1900), a Progressive/Traditional Thinker
by Alessandro Guetta
Religions 2021, 12(8), 625; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12080625 - 10 Aug 2021
Viewed by 2455
Abstract
Elia Benamozegh (born—1823 in Livorno and died—1900 in Livorno)—philosopher, biblical exegete, teacher at the Rabbinical College—was an original and fruitful thinker. At a time when the Jewish kabbalah, or esoteric tradition, was considered by the protagonists of Jewish studies as the result of [...] Read more.
Elia Benamozegh (born—1823 in Livorno and died—1900 in Livorno)—philosopher, biblical exegete, teacher at the Rabbinical College—was an original and fruitful thinker. At a time when the Jewish kabbalah, or esoteric tradition, was considered by the protagonists of Jewish studies as the result of an era of intellectual and religious decadence, Benamozegh indicated it to be the authentic theology of Judaism. In numerous works of varying nature, in Italian, French and Hebrew, the kabbalah is studied by comparing it with the thought of Spinoza and with German idealism (Hegel in particular), and, at a later stage, also with positivism and evolutionism. Benamozegh formulated a pluralistic religious philosophy open to progress by constantly referring to the first phase of Vico’s historicist philosophy and above all to the work of Vincenzo Gioberti. We can read this philosophy as an original and consistent response to the challenges of Modern, secularized thought. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Continental Philosophy and Jewish Thought)
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