Maimonides Lectures on Scepticism
Maimonides Lectures on Scepticism are scheduled three to five times every academic year. Eminent scholars focusing on various aspects of scepticism are invited to present and discuss their research in an evening lecture.
April 9, 2024 – Marcin Wodziński: The Maskilic Library Revisited: The Gaze from Poland
Date
Tuesday, 9 April 2024, 18:00
Abstract
With new and growing research on the Jewish Enlightenment in Eastern Europe, we have learned, among other things, about the wide library of publications by the maskilim and the literary interrelations between authors, texts, and ideas. Yet the intellectual and social connections expressed by these books run much deeper and can be assessed through several other parameters. In this lecture, I will suggest a new look at the maskilic library in Poland as offered by several new approaches and/or resources. I will investigate maskilic book collections as well as maskilic books in collections belonging to non-Jewish representatives of the Polish Enlightenment. Furthermore, I will ask what we can learn from the growing database of subscriptions to Jewish books, including a significant segment of the maskilic publications and subscriptions by the maskilim. Within these wider questions, I will particularly explore the connection between the structure of the maskilic library and the ideas and social practices that were developed by the maskilim, including their engagement with the idea of scepticism.
Marcin Wodziński is a professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław, where he heads the Taube Department of Jewish Studies.
Venue
MCAS
Please contact MCAS for further information and registration.
Poster
[PDF]
Contact and registration
maimonides-centre"AT"uni-hamburg.de
January 23, 2024 – Rebekka Voß: Judaism Sola Scriptura: Tolerance, Translation, and Salvation in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam
Date
Tuesday, 23 January 2024, 18:00
Abstract
This lecture considers scepticism and intercultural exchange within the framework of the early modern Pietist mission to the Jews. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the Pietist mission prompted personal conversations between Christians and a significant number of Jews across Europe. Most Jews were surprisingly willing to speak with the missionaries, despite their evident agenda. These meetings between Pietist missionaries and Jews often resulted in an intense dialogue, entailing an intriguing cultural entanglement. In Amsterdam, the missionaries eagerly approached a number of sceptical Jews, who rejected certain rabbinic teachings about the Messiah, hoping to find these “Karaites” receptive to the Gospel. This missionary context is key to understanding spiritual unrest and debates about biblicising heresies and heterodox beliefs in Judaism in eighteenth-century Amsterdam.
I will focus on one of these scripturalists, the intellectual Eliezer Susman Rudelsum. He is otherwise known as the editor of Yiddish Bible translations and the author of two Dutch treatises on the study of the Hebrew language. Re-evaluating Susman’s oeuvre in light of his personal contacts with Pietist missionaries, Protestant Hebraists, and like-minded Jewish disbelievers sheds light on his worldview and reveals the full complexity of scepticism among Amsterdam Jewry in the eighteenth century. At a time when programmes for the unification of the monotheistic religions and universal peace were popular among Enlightenment thinkers, Eliezer Susman advanced a unique vision of coexistence. The basis of his envisioned brotherhood of Jews and Christians was a Judaism sola scriptura and the shared study of the Hebrew Bible.
Rebekka Voß is Associate Professor of Jewish History at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Venue
MCAS
Please contact MCAS for further information and registration.
Poster
[PDF]
Contact and registration
maimonides-centre@uni-hamburg.de
November 14, 2023 – Elliot Wolfson: Brokenness of Being and the Errancy of Ontological Untruth: Susan Taubes’s Sceptical Faith
Date
Tuesday, 14 November 2023, 18:00
Abstract
This lecture explores Susan Taubes’s criticism of Heidegger's Seinsdenken that pivots around her contention that he absolutized the nothingness of being in a manner analogous to but significantly different than the role assigned to the Godhead on the part of many mystical visionaries. Venturing beyond Heidegger, and yet in some measure indebted to his claim that there is no truth that is not at the same time untruth, Susan characterized truth as the openness to error, the real ontological untruth, that is, a truth that is untrue insofar as it comes forth from the misguided effort to reconstruct the fractured world as an undivided whole. The task rather is to accept the brokenness of our being in the completeness of our incompleteness. At the heart of Susan’s sceptical faith is the commitment to the proposition that to be healed, the brokenness must be broken, but this can come about only by appropriating the perfection of imperfection. Contra Heidegger, Susan maintained that the tragedy of being is mitigated by the openness to the error of untruth exposed as an integral component of the intricacy of life, the threshold of integration that disintegrates after reaching its own limit. Inadvertently, Susan affirmed one of the deeper insights of the kabbalistic tradition: the blemish (pegam) is itself an aspect of the rectification (tiqqun).
Elliot R. Wolfson, a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and Distinguished Professor of Religion at University of California, Santa Barbara.
Venue
MCAS
Please contact MCAS for further information and registration.
Poster
[PDF]
Contact and registration
maimonides-centre@uni-hamburg.de
July 11, 2023 – Michael Brenner: “Is There Jewish Historiography? Is There Jewish History? Are There Jews?”
Date
Tuesday,11 July 2023, 18:00
Abstract
In the nineteenth century, Jewish historiography took shape as a discipline, growing out of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement. Historians such as Isaac Marcus Jost, Heinrich Graetz, and Simon Dubnov had their different interpretations of Jewish history, but they all shared the belief in a single coherent story of the Jews. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, every major university in the United States, along with many in Europe, had its own positions in Jewish history. However, there is also a growing relativisation when it comes to national histories and area studies in general. Can we still talk about a Jewish people and a Jewish culture? What does it mean to be Jewish in the twenty-first century and how will the constant changing of the definition of what Jews are influence the writing of Jewish history in the generations to come?
The first major account of Jewish history for the twenty-first century, David Biale’s Cultures of the Jews, stands for a new approach that tells the story of the Jews by many authors and as that of many cultures. What will be the next steps in writing Jewish history? Can we even still speak of a Jewish history? And how should we teach such a multi-layered history to the next generation of students? This lecture does not provide an answer to this question, but wishes to open the discussion into these and related issues overshadowing our field today.
Michael Brenner is a professor of Jewish history and culture at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the American University, Washington DC.
Venue
MCAS
Please contact MCAS for further information and registration.
Poster
[PDF]
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maimonides-centre"AT"uni-hamburg.de
May 9, 2023 – Nadja Germann: Before al-Ghazālī: Scepticism and Doubt in Early Islamic Thought
Date
Tuesday, 9 May 2023, 18:00
Abstract
Al-Ghazālī’s scepticism is proverbial, at least among specialists. The chief point of reference for this assessment is his Tahāfut al-falāsifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), particularly the Seventeenth Discussion dealing with causality and miracles. The primary message of this text seems to be clear: there is nothing that human beings can know with certainty, for everything utterly depends on God, at once the free creator and the unbound sustainer of everything, with the effect that from one moment to the other, He could change everything: turn an animal into a stone, black into white, or good into evil. The target of this devastating epistemic view likewise seems to be evident: the falāsifa, the Greek-inspired Arabic philosophers, first and foremost al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā, with their excessive trust in the human capacity to know. However, what is often overlooked in current research is the fact that al-Ghazālī’s critique does not come out of the blue. It may primarily react to the falāsifa, but in order to fully seize its significance, other approaches, beyond falsafa, must be taken into account. This is what I intend to do, with the example of al-Jāḥiẓ and the adab tradition sparked by his œuvre.
Nadja Germann is a professor of Arabic Philosophy at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.
Venue
MCAS
Please contact MCAS for further information and registration.
Poster
[PDF]
Contact and registration
maimonides-centre"AT"uni-hamburg.de
May 2, 2023 – David Myers: Scepticism, Postmodernism, and Modern Jewish Historiography
Date
Tuesday, 2 May 2023, 18:00
Abstract
This lecture offers a recounting of modern intellectual and personal history in order to address the claim that postmodernism introduced a debilitating scepticism about the capacity of history to grasp the past. Drawing on the critique of Carlo Ginzburg, it will confront the argument that postmodernism blurs the boundary between fact and fiction and thereby renders the noble craft of history an incoherent jumble of relativism. It will recall a memorable debate in Germany that laid out the stakes of the debate over postmodernism’s effects and will conclude with reflections on where we stand today in our post-postmodern era.
David N. Myers is Distinguished Professor of History and holds the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Venue
MCAS
Please contact MCAS for further information and registration.
Poster
[PDF]
Contact and registration
maimonides-centre"AT"uni-hamburg.de
January 31, 2023 – Dimitrios Vasilakis: Dionysius the Areopagite between Faith and Scepticism: His Reception in the Twentieth Century
Date
Tuesday, 31 January 2023, 18:00
The author of the Areopagitic Corpus (ca. sixth century AD) engaged with pagan Neoplatonism and the Christian tradition (which also drew on Hebrew heritage, according to Golitzin). He is famous for systematising the dual path leading to God: kataphatic (positive) and apophatic (negative) theology. Faith (pistis), a Platonic term used by Proclus (fifth century) to describe how we can come into contact with divinity, relates to the apophatic mode: because God transcends us, we may have only pistis for Him, who stricto sensu is unknown. Thus, we find scepticism at the top of the system. Gregory Palamas (fourteenth century) developed the Dionysian dialectic of kataphasis-apophasis, employing the distinction between essence and energies. He played a pivotal role in Dionysian hermeneutics, becoming a hallmark of twentieth-century Russian/Greek intellectuals who attempted to release the Eastern Christian tradition from its “Babylonian captivity,” as Florovsky would say. However, Dionysius’s reception was mixed: some thinkers trusted that he was representing genuine orthodoxy (e.g., Lossky and Yannaras), while others were sceptical (Meyendorff, Schmemann, St Sophrony Sakharov) or neutral (Florovsky and Zizioulas). In my talk, I will sketch out this framework, expanding on examples of Dionysius’s reception, on the basis of the kataphasis-apophasis pair.
Dimitrios A. Vasilakis is a research associate in the “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s Reception among Key Thinkers of the 20th Century Orthodox World (Vl. Lossky, Fr. Sophrony, Chr. Yannaras, J. Zizioulas)” DFG project at Universität Erfurt. He has recently been elected and is under appointment as an assistant professor of philosophy of late antiquity and the Middle Ages at the University of Ioannina, Greece.
Venue
MCAS
Please contact MCAS for further information and registration.
Poster
[PDF]
Contact and registration
maimonides-centre"AT"uni-hamburg.de
November 1, 2022 – James Conant: Conceptions of Logic: Universalist vs. Specialist, Critical vs. Demonstrative, and Logocentric vs. Metalogical
Date
Tuesday, 1 November 2022, 18:00
Abstract
The talk will distinguish conceptions of logic through distinguishing some of the differing ways in which answers to the following questions have been combined: Are philosophy and logic two things or one? Logic and mathematics — two things or one? Can one step outside of logic and regard it from sideways on? Or does logic not have an “outside”? Is logic a science and, if so, of what? Is it a special science with its own proprietary subject matter or an absolutely general science — in which case what does it investigate? And if it is not a science at all, then what form of understanding does it yield? With the aid of these questions we will compare and contrast the three fundamentally different conceptions of logic found in Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus with each other and all three with the standard contemporary conception of logic.
James Conant is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.
Venue
MCAS and Online (Zoom)
Please contact MCAS for further information and registration.
Poster
[PDF]
Contact and registration
maimonides-centre@uni-hamburg.de
June 14, 2022 – Moshe Idel: Abraham Abulafia’s Prophetic Books
Date
Tuesday, 14 June 2022, 18:00
Abstract
The prophetic Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia (1240–c.1292) used a variety of literary genres in his writings: commentaries on Sefer Yeṣirah, Maimonides’s secrets, and the Pentateuch; poems; detailed handbooks with instructions
on how to achieve prophetic experiences, especially Hayyei ha-ʿOlam ha-Baʾ and Or ha-Sekhel; books on grammar, which are now probably lost; and a series of prophetic books, written from 1279 onwards in the Byzantine Empire, Rome, and Messina, which have survived in fragments. These books contain details of revelations he claimed to have received from the Agent Intellect and commentaries on those revealed statements. The latter genre includes by far the most complex, obscure, and difficult treatises, which are extant in fewer manuscripts and have not yet attracted the due attention of most scholars in the field. Moshe Idel’s point is that despite the difficulties of decoding those texts in their original Hebrew, they were preserved in manuscripts found in libraries that were connected in one way or another to Christian Kabbalists in the Renaissance period.
Moshe Idel is Emeritus Max Cooper Professor in Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Venue
MCAS and Online (Zoom)
Please contact MCAS for further information and registration.
Poster
[PDF]
Contact and registration
maimonides-centre@uni-hamburg.de
June 8, 2022 – Ilit Ferber: Necessity and Impossibility: On the Internal Split of Identity in Améry and Jankélévitch
Date
June 8, 2022, 18:00
Abstract
Jean Améry (1912–1978) and Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903–1985) were both Jews who grew up in assimilated families and did not have any special affinity, if any at all, with their Jewish origins and heritage. This changed dramatically during the Second World War. It was at this point that they both became suddenly and exclusively defined by their Jewish identity. This moment was formative for both in that it confronted them with the internal paradoxes inherent to their identity. This talk will closely examine the question of Jewish identity in two of their short texts. The first is Améry’s “The Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew,” while the second is Vladimir Jankélévitch’s “Judaism as an ‘Internal Problem.’” Both texts (written around the same time) deal with the paradoxical nature of Jewish identity and raise crucial questions that concern the unstable yet strangely strong feeling of identity that is never singular and always liminal. This paper will present a close reading of these two texts, situating them in Améry’s and Jankélévitch’s overall oeuvre, and will continue with a few remarks on what Ilit Ferber takes to be the important relationship between the two thinkers, locating both on the fine line between self-affirmation and self-doubt.
Ilit Ferber is an associate professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University.
Venue
MCAS and online (Zoom)
Please contact MCAS for further information and registration.
Poster
[PDF]
April 26, 2022 – Andreas Kilcher: Critique of Language as Critique of Nation: Linguistic Cosmopolitanism according to Fritz Mauthner
Date
26 April 2022, 18:00
Abstract
The language theory of the nineteenth century was essentially based on an organic family model—and thus also founded the concept of nationalism. In his main opus, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (3 volumes, 1901/2), Fritz Mauthner, who was born in multilingual Prague, countered this linguistic nationalism with an alternative model. Instead of linguistic identities and borders, it focuses on connections and transitions between languages. With recourse to the physical and linguistic theory of waves as well as the sociological theory of imitation, Mauthner explained adaptation and loan as universal principles of an ultimately global mixing of and fertilise each other. Thus, Mauthner radically questions the territorialisability of language in order to assert a post-national linguistic cosmopolitanism.
Andreas Kilcher is a professor of literature and culture studies at ETH Zürich.
Venue
Online (Zoom)
Please contact MCAS for further information and registration.
Poster
[PDF]
February 16, 2022 – Ben D. Sommer: Intentional Ambiguity in the Pentateuch’s Revelation Narratives: Doubt as a Religious Value in the Lawgiving in Exodus
Date
February 16, 2022, 18:00
Abstract
Many modern critics of religion, along with many fundamentalist adherents of religion, assume that claims to revealed knowledge bolster dogmatic certainty: that which has been clearly revealed by God must be entirely and undeniably true. Revealed religion, then, seems to have no room for doubt; scepticism must be the antithesis of faith. Ben Sommer will not only undermine these assumptions shared by critics of religion and fundamentalists (who understand religion in nearly identical ways and differ only in their evaluation of it); he will also argue that the story of lawgiving in Exodus 19–20 overturns these assumptions. That narrative, like several other crucial passages in Exodus and Numbers, deliberately makes it difficult to be sure what God said during the revelation, as opposed to what Moses interpreted God as saying. Sommer’s close readings of biblical texts will bolster liberal theologies of modern Judaism, especially those of Abraham Joshua Heschel and Franz Rosenzweig. This view of revelation cultivates a positive attitude towards a degree of religious scepticism. Doubt fosters an epistemological humility that is at the core of religious consciousness, in opposition to the dogmatic confidence that critics of religion and fundamentalists regard as the essence of religion.
Benjamin D. Sommer is a professor of Bible and Ancient Semitic Languages at the Jewish Theological Seminary and a senior fellow at the Kogod Center for Contemporary Jewish Thought at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North Americ
Venue
Online (Zoom)
Please contact MCAS for further information and registration.
Poster
[PDF]
January 10, 2022 – Dana Lloyd: Religious Freedom and Land Rights: On Legal Language and Ethical Scepticism
Date
January 10, 2022, 18:00
Abstract
Discussions of religious freedom in the United States are often prompted by conflict over school prayer, the teaching of evolution, conscientious objection, and prisoners’ devotion. The right to the free exercise of religion is understood as an individual right in the US context because of its framing in the First Amendment. In contrast, for societies that consider the land to be sacred, the freedom of religion and the freedom to possess land are often one and the same. When this is the case, freedom of religion is not an individual right; it is a collective right.
This paper explores the possibility of understanding religious freedom as a collective right, given the close relationship between religious freedom and the use of land as a place of worship. During this session, Dana Lloyd will discuss the 1988 US Supreme Court case Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, a landmark case in constitutional law, where the court denied the right of three Native American nations to practise their religion in a place they consider sacred for the sake of protecting government property rights. She will ask what ethical scepticism can offer Native communities, who have neither common legal language nor common epistemology with settler governments and courts, in order to advance their struggles to protect their sacred lands.
Dana Lloyd is an assistant professor of global interdisciplinary studies at Villanova University.
Venue
Online (Zoom)
Please contact MCAS for further information and registration.
Poster
[PDF]
November 15, 2021 – Konrad Schmid: How to Read the Torah: Linguistic and Hermeneutical Reflections on an Ambiguous Text
Date
November 15, 2021, 18:00
Abstract
The Torah is traditionally ascribed to Moses, but it is in fact an anonymous work by scribes who produced it as a written text between the ninth and fourth centuries BCE. Its oral traditions reach even back further, into the second millennium BCE. The complex result of this long composition history is an ambiguous, often contradictory, yet readable text, as its long reception history, foremost in Judaism and Christianity, demonstrates. If read closely, the linguistic shape of the Torah reveals an interesting set of checks and balances between its theological positions. It seems that its authors were not primarily concerned with narrative or legal consistency, but rather with creating a literary universe that includes a variety of theological perspectives. The historical hermeneutics that drove the redaction and composition of the Torah were geared towards retaining its ambiguity and actively soliciting the reader’s affirmative, critical, and/or sceptical imagination, not to eliminating its material difficulties and making the task of reading as easy as possible.
Konrad Schmid is a professor of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Judaism at Universität Zürich.
Venue
hybrid (in-person/Zoom)
Please contact MCAS for further information and registration.
Poster
[PDF]
July 5, 2021 – Jelscha Schmid: Beyond Scepticism—Maimon’s Rational Dogmatism and the Method of Fictions
Date
July 5, 2021, 18:00
Abstract
It is rarely noted that Salomon Maimon not only raises crucial sceptical challenges to Kant’s arguments, but that he also offers an important criticism of Kant’s method of philosophising. Although he agrees with the latter that the task of critical philosophy must consist in setting metaphysics on “the secure course of science,” he disagrees substantially as to how this transformation is to be brought about. In Maimon’s view, critical philosophy must employ a new method, which he characterises as the “method of fictions.” Only if it employs useful fictions can critical philosophy assume the status of a proper science. In my talk, I will examine Maimon’s method of fictions in order to explain why he took it to be essential to transforming metaphysics into a proper science. In doing so, I reject the dominant interpretation which takes this method of fictions as expressing his “empirical scepticism,” since it misconceives the role and status of fictions in Maimon’s system. I arrive at this view through consideration of the two distinct kinds of fictions (i.e., fictions of the imagination and fictions of reason) that he describes throughout his major works, only the former of which should be taken as a result of empirical scepticism. The other kind, however, has to be explained as a consequence of Maimon’s infamous “rational dogmatism” and is what he characterises as philosophical fictions. I will argue that for Maimon, philosophical fictions provide the methodological means to first articulate the epistemic ideal and cognitive standards, which are the sole grounds from which empirical scepticism and its consequent identification of fictions of the imagination can arise.
Venue
Online (Zoom)
Poster
[PDF]
January 12, 2021 – Alexandra Zinke: The Suspension of Judgment in Pyrrhonian and Cartesian Scepticism
Date
January 12, 2021, 18:00
Abstract
Recent years have seen a rapidly increasing interest in the suspension of judgment, usually with a focus on its nature. The now dominant views hold that the suspension of judgment is not to be characterized by the mere absence of doxastic attitudes, but that it either is a sui generis indecision-representing attitude or involves a higher-order belief. These views provide an understanding of suspension in terms of the presence of some mental state that (partly) constitutes the doxastic state of suspension. They describe what I call a “positive” conception of the suspension of judgment. In the history of thought, as in contemporary epistemology, suspension has been of particular interest in relation to scepticism, which considers the suspension of judgment to be the only rational reaction to sceptical arguments. Focusing on Pyrrhonian and Cartesian scepticism, I will argue that sceptical arguments do not speak in favour of adopting a positive mental state (be it a sui generis indecision-representing attitude or a higher-order belief), but demand the absence of judgment alone. Scepticism involves a “privative” notion of suspension. Thus, present characterizations of suspension are at odds with the central role of the notion within the epistemological tradition.
Venue
Online (Zoom)
Poster
[PDF]
June 9, 2020 – Yaacob Dweck: The Rabbinic Reactionary in the Early Modern Sephardic Diaspora: Notes on a Social
May 19, 2020 – Emidio Spinelli: Knowledge, Morality, and Finitude: Sceptical Traces in Some Contemporary Thinkers
Date
May 19, 2020, 16:00
Abstract
Although there is no space nowadays for any strong presence of the sceptical philosophical tradition analogous to the widespread and notorious phenomenon of the so-called Rehabilitierung of the Aristotelian heritage by some thinkers of the nineteenth century, it is still possible to detect traces of some aspects of ancient scepticism at work in some contemporary debates. In this lecture Emidio Spinelli tries to examine how this sceptical influence can be considered relevant, if not decisive, at least in the case of the epistemological and moral reflections proposed by Robert Fogelin, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and Odo Marquard.
Venue
Online (Zoom)
February 4, 2020 – Reuven Kiperwasser: Humour and Scepticism in Narratives in the Babylonian Talmud
Date
February 4, 2020, 18:00
Abstract
The focus of this presentation is the critique of religious values from within the rabbinic tradition in the various forms of expressing doubts, or scepticism, about its passed-down religious narratives, practices, and authoritative structures. Reading rabbinic narratives, the lecture aims to identify narrators who looked for other theological options and answers and who were sceptical and critical towards the common acceptance of theological norms. The paper will also be dedicated to the role of humour in expressing theological ideas in the Babylonian Talmud. These narrators quite often used laughter and the comic to express their doubts and to reinforce their intra-group connections. Analysing appearances of mockery in theological debates, it will be shown that laughter opens a moment of potential rupture in the continuity of interactions. Such moments produce some re-organisation in order to reorientate the action towards continuity rather than turbulence. The lecture will analyse a specific case study, the rabbinic narrative from the Babylonian Talmud, and will discuss its possible meanings.
Venue
Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies
Schlüterstraße 51/5th floor
Seminar Room 5060
20146 Hamburg
Poster
[PDF]
January 8, 2020 – Katja Maria Vogt: Skepticism as Philosophy
Date
January 8, 2020, 18:00
Abstract
Call this the Philosophy Charge: Pyrrhonian skepticism cannot count as philosophy because skeptics aim at tranquility rather than the truth. Against this, I argue that the Philosophy Charge neglects that the skeptic starts out from a distinctively philosophical experience of the world. The charge misconstrues tranquility as generic rather than truthrelated, and employs a notion of philosophy that is too narrow. My response to the Philosophy Charge sheds light on the starting points of skepticism, socalled anomaly and difference, and the ways they motivate inquiry as well as the pursuit of tranquility. Beyond this, I treat the reconstruction of Sextus Empiricus’ skepticism as an occasion—and perhaps even a challenge—for reflections on the nature of philosophy. The paper focuses on skepticism’s relation to the perennial metaphysical question of what the world must be like for it to strike us in conflicting and divergent ways. Rather than offer a positive metaphysical view, the skeptics engage in a project that, I argue, is of inherent philosophical interest: the devising of mental and linguistic practices that aim to avoid representing the world in misleading ways.
Katja Maria Vogt is professor of philosophy at Columbia University, New York.
Venue
Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies
Schlüterstraße 51/5th floor
Seminar Room 5060
20146 Hamburg
Poster
[PDF]
November 11, 2019 – FU Youde: Maimonides on Prophecy: Synthesis and Reconciliation
Date
November 11, 2019, 18:00
Abstract
The lecture will introduce and analyse Maimonides’s theory of prophecy, with reference to the following aspects: previous and contemporaneous approaches to prophecy; the human qualifications needed for being a prophet; the process of actualising a prophecy; and the degrees of prophets. It will be argued that in several respects, Maimonides’s methodological approach is not “either/or,” but rather “both/and”: (1) both God and the human being play a role in the formation of prophecy; (2) both the intellect and the imagination function in the process of prophesying; and (3) both Aristotelian and Neoplatonic elements are instrumental in the shaping of Maimonides’s theory of prophecy.
FU Youde is the director of the Center for Judaic and Inter-Religious Studies at Shandong University in Jinan/China.
Venue
Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies
Schlüterstraße 51/5th floor
Seminar Room 5060
20146 Hamburg
Poster
[PDF]
July 09, 2019 – Nadja El Kassar: How to Deal with Ignorance? Some Historical Suggestions
Date
July 09, 2019
Abstract
Ever since its early days, philosophy has been fascinated by ignorance. In her talk, Nadja El Kassar will discuss historical answers to the question of how it should be dealt with. The question itself is seldom raised explicitly, but a number of philosophers have addressed the issue of dealing with ignorance. The lecture focusses in particular on Socrates’, John Locke’s and Immanuel Kant’s suggestions on the subject. Socratic ignorance can be read as a suggestion that knowledge and wisdom are the best ways of dealing with ignorance. Locke suggests that four principles (the principle of indifference, the principle of evidence, the principle of appraisal, and the principle of proportionality) are the best ways of dealing with ignorance and also with error. Finally, Kant argues that orienting oneself is the key to dealing with ignorance. Nadja El Kassar will discuss and relate the three proposals and will close by examining their relevance to today’s question of how to deal with ignorance.
Nadja El Kassar is a postdoctoral research at ETH Zürich/ Switzerland.
Poster
[pdf]
Venue
Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies
Schlüterstraße 51/5th floor
Seminar Room 5060
20146 Hamburg
November 22, 2018 – Richard Bett: Can we be Ancient Sceptics?
Date
Noevember 22, 2018
Abstract
The lecture will consider how far Pyrrhonism might be a viable outlook today. The answer depends in part on what range of issues suspension of judgment might plausibly be generated in today's intellectual climate. On many ethical, religious, and philosophical issues, the prospects seem just as good as in Sextus' day. Concerning natural science, the matter is more complicated. Here there are many issues where we know too much for suspension of judgment to be realistic, and where science has infiltrated ordinary life. On the other hand, suspension of judgment is possible on some issues, such as climate change, where there is a vocal popular opinion about a scientific question. In addition, it is possible on philosophical questions concerning the status of science itself, questions that did not occur to the ancients. A further issue is the value of suspension of judgment. Here Sextus seems overly ambitious, because of exaggerated claims about ataraxia as its outcome. Whether suspension of judgment would yield ataraxia depends on people's character and circumstances, regardless of the perceived importance of the topic. What remains is a worthwhile recommendation to be open-minded.
Richard Bett is a professor of philosophy and classics at Johns Hopkins University.
Lecture2Go
[Link]
Venue
Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies
Schlüterstraße 51/5th floor
Seminar Room 5060
20146 Hamburg
May 29, 2018 – Glenn Dynner: "I began to have Doubts:" Defection from Orthodoxy and the Traditionalist Jewish Response in Twentieth-Century Poland
Date
May 29, 2018
Abstract
The early twentieth century was a period of accelerated acculturation among Polish Jews. As many young people discovered rationalist literature and joined modern political movements, rabbinic and Hasidic leaders evinced panic over youth defections and the “emptying-out” of their study halls. However, secularising Jewish youths in the Second Polish Republic encountered formidable barriers to integration, including restrictions on university admissions and frequent physical assaults on campuses. Many found themselves in a state of cultural limbo. At the same time, Hasidic and rabbinic leaders revitalised their institutions by appropriating secularist educational, political, and institutional modes—a defensive acculturation strategy that inadvertently transformed Polish Jewish traditionalism itself. This lecture examines both Polish Jewish youth “defections” and the innovative traditionalist responses to this perceived crisis.
Lecture2Go
[link]
May 7, 2018 – Christoph Schulte: Metaphysical Scepticism concerning the Philosphy of History: Mendelssohn's Arguments against the Progress of Humankind
Date
May 07, 2018
Abstract
In his seminal work Jerusalem (1783), Moses Mendelssohn explicitly refuses his close friend Lessing’s ideas of a successive education of humankind and a general progress in the development of human rationality and morality in world history. This scepticism towards the upcoming modern philosophy of history and the idea of an infinite progressive evolution of humankind from the beginnings of world history is based on the principles of Mendelssohn’s metaphysics, his anthropology, and his philosophy of natural law. This lecture will discuss Mendelssohn’s arguments and their philosophical relevance in some philosophers of the 20th century.
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February 21, 2018 – Moshe Halbertal: Facing Uncertainty: Maimonides' Concept of Law
Date
February 21, 2018
Abstract
Uncertainty is an essential feature of the human condition; it is simultaneously a source of deep anxiety and of thrill. The present state of the world, its past, and what it holds for us in the future are frequently unknown to us. This lecture will examine the moral and legal implications of uncertainty, exploring the subject through Maimonides’ legal work as it faces the challenges of uncertainty in Jewish law. Jewish law takes a keen interest in this feature of the human condition, and it has vast and intense discussions which address the following question: “what are the norms that have to be applied in conditions in which we do not know the facts of the matter?” The Talmudic tradition also addresses situations in which we might have a full grasp of the facts of the matter, but deep uncertainty about the proper norms that have to be applied to these facts. In such cases, our uncertainty is not factual but normative, and while affirming our normative uncertainty, the Talmud attempts to formulate rules that will be applied in conditions of uncertainty about the rules. What we can learn from these attempts to regulate conditions of uncertainty is how Maimonides understood its moral and legal significance and how his attempts to regulate these conditions reflected his conception of Jewish law.
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July 11, 2017 – Carlos Fraenkel: Metaphysical Scepticism and the Sufi Alternative: Al-Ghazālī, Maimonides, and Abraham ben Maimonides
Date
July 11, 2017
Abstract
In my talk, I will offer a solution to the puzzle of why Abraham ben Maimonides staunchly defends his father's intellectual legacy against critics in the West and the East and presents himself as his intellectual heir while at the same time strikingly departing from this legacy: whereas Maimonides interprets Judaism as a philosophical religion, Abraham proposes a Sufi interpretation. I will use al-Ghazali's account of the relationship between falsafa and Sufism as a model to explain the relationship between father and son. Both al-Ghazali and Maimonides are metaphysical sceptics – i.e., they hold that reason cannot conclusively settle metaphysical questions. However, in contrast to al-Ghazali and Abraham, Maimonides does not try to overcome scepticism through the Sufi path to God. Therefore, Abraham's departure from Maimonides turns out to be (at least in part) an attempt to solve a specific epistemological problem.
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June 20, 2017 – Omri Boehm: Maimonides, Spinoza and Kant on Enlightenment and Prophecy
Date
June 20, 2017
Abstract
It is common to understand Kant’s notion of enlightenment as having the courage to “think for oneself.” While not contesting this definition, I reject the assumption that selbst denken in Kant consists in refusing the guidance of another over our own thinking. Paradoxical though it may seem, following another’s guidance — in the strong sense of following without understanding — emerges in Kant as a necessary condition for thinking for oneself. In this light, the relationship between enlightenment (thinking for oneself) and religion (prophecy/revelation) must be reconsidered. Far from depending on the rejection of the prophets’ authority — as it is in Spinoza’s concept of enlightenment — Kantian enlightenment is impossible without it.
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June 06, 2017 – Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann: Lingua Adamica and Philological Scepticism – Rise and Fall in Kabbalistic Key-Concepts
Date
June 06, 2017
Abstract
God spoke and the world became real; and the pre-lapsarian Adam was given insight into the essence and the power of the divine language. It was one of the aims of both Jewish and Christian Kabbalah to regain this paradisiacal knowledge, which was lost with the fall of the first human beings. The idea of the Adamic language stems from Philo; it was later shared by the Christian Church Fathers as well as Jewish Rabbis, and it was fully developed by the Christian Kabbalists Pico and Reuchlin. The concept was harshly criticised in the High Middle Ages by Nachmanides (Ramban), and in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, biblical criticism following these traces made it obvious that Philo’s allegorical exegesis of Gen. 2, 19 f could not provide the philological basis for those far-reaching pious speculative and mystical consequences. However, the idea remained vivid, in spite of acid criticism in the age of Enlightenment, and it finally survived in Benjamin’s theory of language.
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[link]
Publication
Schmidt-Biggemann. Lingua Adamica and Philosophy: The Rise and Destruction of a Concept. In Yearbook of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies 2017, edited by Bill Rebiger, 247–266. Berlin, Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2017.
[Open Access]
May 16, 2017 – Jani Hakkarainen: Hume on Possible Duration without Possible Temporal Parts – A Sceptical Solution
Date
May 16, 2017
Abstract
In A Treatise of Human Nature Book 1, Part 2, Section 5, Paragraph 29 (1739), David Hume (1711‒76) seems to put forward the view that an atemporal, steadfast, and unchanging object has the capacity to endure. This is deeply puzzling, for Hume believes that any enduring object divides into temporal parts. However, this is not possible for an atemporal object, that is, for temporal nothingness, so temporal nothingness cannot endure.
Jani Hakkarainen will argue that Hume should be read as claiming that in such cases it merely appears to us that temporal nothingness has the capacity to endure, and that it is causally possible that reality is different from appearance: really, there is a duration and composition of temporal parts. Therefore, the lecture draws on a distinction which Hume himself employs at the end of Treatise 1.2.5: the traditional sceptical distinction, familiar from the work of the ancient sceptic Sextus Empiricus, between appearance and reality in the sense of perceptions being distinguished from their real causes.
May 03, 2017 – Jonathan Garb: Doubt and Certainty in Early Modern Kabbalah
Date
May 03, 2017
Abstract
This lecture shall contrast the rhetoric of certainty in medieval Kabbalah with the increased recurrence of doubt in modern Kabbalah, tracing the development of the ontological discourse on doubt and stressing the radical possibility that doubt is not limited to human perception of the divine, but could also limit divine self-knowledge. I shall then turn to psychological discussions of doubt and certainty of the Hasidim and R. Kook. I shall then speculate as to the broader historical context of this development: the rise of scepticism in the seventeenth century, Jewish enlightenment in the nineteenth century, and full-fledged secularisation in R. Kook’s time.
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[link]
Publication
Garb, Jonathan. Doubt and Certainty in Early Modern Kabbalah. In Yearbook of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies 2017, edited by Bill Rebiger, 239–248. Berlin, Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2017.
[Open Access]
March 01, 2017 – Nuccio Ordine: The Search for Truth in Giordano Bruno's Work
Date
March 01, 2017
Abstract
For Giordano Bruno, we do not possess the truth, but we search for it. His philosophy begins with Copernican heliocentrism and approaches an endless view of the universe: in an infinite universe, in fact, there can be no absolute centre; the centre of the universe is the one who observes the universe. Bruno therefore criticises two rigid and opposing but complementary positions: dogmatism (which posits that there is one truth), and some radical currents of scepticism (which deny the existence of truth). Bruno praises a point of view that encompasses doubt, uncertainty, and relativity, interwoven with typical arguments of scepticism, but places them in a perspective in which the search for truth is essential to give meaning to life.
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February 08, 2017 – Moshe Idel: Maimonides – From Mysticism to Scepticism
Date
February 08, 2017
Abstract
The lecture will first deal with an early passage by Maimonides, found in his commentary on the Mishnah, Sanhedrin, dealing with the post-mortem union of the human intellect with the angelic world, which reflects the impact of the rational mysticism of Avicenna. This passage was accurately translated from Arabic into Hebrew by Nahmanides, which puts into relief aspects that correspond with his understanding of Kabbalah.
Then, following the lead of Leo Strauss and Shlomo Pines, Idel will briefly discuss the sceptical aspects of the late Maimonides, in the Guide for the Perplexed, concerning his attitude to the Hebrew language and the limits of human speculation, and finally he will discuss a passage from the Guide dealing with the manner in which the secrets of the Torah should be extracted from the biblical text, and compare it to Abraham Abulafia’s ecstatic Kabbalah.
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June 01, 2016 – Therese Fuhrer: Augustinus Scepticus: Sceptical Strategies in Augustine's Argumentation
Date
June 01, 2016
Abstract
In his early work Contra Academicos, Augustine attempted to refute the well-known arguments of the ancient sceptics. Here and also in later works, strategies of argument are already present that were later central for Descartes (the famous si fallor sum, etc.). However, in the case of Augustine’s refutation, the goal is a secure foundation for the possibility of belief in divine (biblical) truth. Augustine views the human ability to recognize this truth as a problem, in the same way as the sceptics saw the ability to recognise the objects and contents of the real world as a problem. A sphere in which this sceptical position becomes apparent is Augustine’s Bible exegesis, which often works with several possible interpretations of the text. Augustine here maintains a linguistic scepticism that is apparent already in De Magistro: the human ability to advance, by means of the text, to recognition of the divine sententia, is seen as limited; however, the position is dogmatic in the sense that it assumes the existence of truth.
Poster
[pdf]
March 09, 2016 – Dirk Westerkamp: Salomon Maimon's Alethic Scepticism in Context
Date
March 09, 2016
Abstract
Praised by Fichte as ‘one of the greatest thinkers of our time,’ Salomon Maimon argued for a scepticism that challenged the Kantian foundation of transcendental logic. Maimon’s arguments not only had a major impact on Post-Kantian and German Idealist thought; they also illuminate the logotectonic of sceptical thinking in general. There are at least four contexts within which Maimon’s philosophical arguments can be situated: (i) in the context of Pyrrhonian scepticism, (ii) in the context of eighteenth century sceptical metaphysics (Hume), (iii) in the context of pre-idealist scepticism (1790–1794) which led to the foundation of idealist subjectivism, and (iv) in the context of Jewish Scepticism. Westerkamp’s paper aimed to shed some light on the first three contexts—leaving the matter of Jewish scepticism for the discussion. He tried to elucidate why Maimon’s alethic scepticism is still indebted to the ‘logic of truth’ (Kant). He concluded with remarks on Maimon’s implicit (sceptical) philosophy of language.
Poster
[pdf]
February 23, 2016 – Harold Tarrant: The Use and Abuse of Argument on Both Sides of the Question: Where Platonism and Scepticism Could Find Common Ground
Date
February 23, 2016
Abstract
Certain Platonic dialogues, including Lysis, Euthydemus, Theaetetus, Phaedrus, and Parmenides were noted in antiquity for their occasional employment of contrary arguments. In some instances this was attacked by opponents of either Platonism or Scepticism, or both. Known early critics were the Peripatetic Dicaearchus and the Epicurean Colotes, whose pamphlet-like works ‘Against Plato’s Lysis’ and ‘Against Plato’s Euthydemus’ partially survive after being found in Philodemus’ library. Since the polemic ran from before the time of Arcesilaus until that of his contemporary Colotes, it is possible that the very attention that the relevant passages were being afforded outside the Academy had encouraged the Academy’s counter-attack. Some of the arguments that had been used quite early on to defend such tactics may well have been preserved by the late Neoplatonists (Hermias, Proclus, anon. Prolegomena), who were keen to continue the justification of contrary arguments (especially in Phaedrus, Theaetetus, and Parmenides) without being associated with the Sceptics, who were closely associated with this approach. Of particular interest are the separate educational purposes that Proclus would afford ad hominem elenchus and the arguments on both sides.
Poster
[pdf]
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