You are not signed in. Sign in.

List Books: Buy books on ListBooks.org

Dilemmas in Modern Jewish Thought: The Dialectics of Revelation and History »

Book cover image of Dilemmas in Modern Jewish Thought: The Dialectics of Revelation and History by Michael L. Morgan

Authors: Michael L. Morgan
ISBN-13: 9780253338785, ISBN-10: 0253338786
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Date Published: November 1992
Edition: (Non-applicable)

Find Best Prices for This Book »

Author Biography: Michael L. Morgan

MICHAEL L. MORGAN is Professor in the Philosophy and Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University. He is the author of Platonic Piety: Philosophy and Ritual in Fourth Century Athens and editor of The Jewish Thought of Emil Fackenheim and Classics of Moral and Political Theory.

Book Synopsis

"MIchael Morgan has served up an intellectual treat. These subtle and carefully reasoned essays explore the dilemmas of the post-modern Jew who would take history seriously without losing the commanding presence Israel heard at Sinai.... It is a pleasure to be nourished by a fresh mind exploring the tension between reason and revelation, history and faith." — Rabbi Samuel Karff

"This is without doubt one of the most significant works in modern Jewish thought and a must for a thoughtful student of contemporary Jewish philosophy." — Rabbie Sheldon Zimmerman

"This may well mark the next stage in the long history of Jewish self-understanding." — Ethics

"... rigorous history of modern Jewish thought... " — Choice

Is Judaism a timeless, universal set of beliefs or, rather, is it historical and contingent in its relation to different times and places? Morgan clarifies the tensions and dilemmas that characterize modern thinking about the nature of Judaism and clears the way for Jews to appreciate their historical situation, yet locate enduring values and principles in a post-Holocaust world.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Ch. 1Overcoming the Remoteness of the Past: Memory and Historiography in Modern Jewish Thought1
Ch. 2History and Modern Jewish Thought: Spinoza and Mendelssohn on the Ritual Law14
Ch. 3Liberalism in Mendelssohn's Jerusalem27
Ch. 4The Curse of Historicity: The Role of History in Leo Strauss's Jewish Thought40
Ch. 5Leo Strauss and the Possibility of Jewish Philosophy55
Ch. 6Judaism and Peter Berger's Heretical Imperative68
Ch. 7Jewish Ethics after the Holocaust79
Ch. 8Historicism, Evil, and Post-Holocaust Moral Thought96
Ch. 9Philosophy, History, and the Jewish Thinker: Jewish Thought and Philosophy in Emil Fackenheim's To Mend the World111
Ch. 10Franz Rosenzweig, Objectivity, and the New Thinking125
Ch. 11Jewish Philosophy and Historical Self-Consciousness133
Ch. 12Contemporary Jewish Thought in America146
Notes157
Index179

Subjects