Category Books

Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation »

Authors: Leora Faye Batnitzky
ISBN-13: 9780521861564, ISBN-10: 052186156X
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Date Published: May 2006
Edition: (Non-applicable)

Author Biography: Leora Faye Batnitzky

Leora Batnitzky is Asssociate Professor of Religion at Princeton University. She is the author of Idolatry and Representation: the Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered and editor of the forthcoming Martin Buber: Schriften zur Philosophie und Religion. She is co-editor of Jewish Studies Quarterly.

Book Synopsis

Leora Batnitzky brings together two seemingly incongruous contemporaries, demonstrating that their projects had many parallels.

1	Strauss and Levinas between Athens and Jerusalem	3
2	Levinas's defense of modern philosophy : how Strauss might respond	28
3	'Freedom depends upon its bondage' : the shared debt to Franz Rosenzweig	57
4	An irrationalist rationalism : Levinas's transformation of Hermann Cohen	75
5	The possibility of premodern rationalism : Strauss's transformation of Hermann Cohen	94
6	Against utopia : law and its limits	117
7	Zionism and the discovery of prophetic politics	140
8	Politics and hermeneutics : Strauss's and Levinas's retrieval of classical Jewish sources	163
9	Revelation and commandments : Strauss, Levinas, and the theologico-political predicament	181
10	Concluding thoughts : progress or return?	204