Fellows and Research Projects: 2016–17

Senior Fellow: January–June 2017

Research Project: Jewish Scepticism and Jewish Political Tradition within the Christian Debate on the King during the Seventeenth Century

This project intends to explore Jewish scepticism as a methodology of investigation within the Jewish political tradition, and, in particular, within the Jewish reflection on monarchy. Within Judaism, in fact, we can find a broad and articulate discussion on the issue of authority in all its aspects, including the political one. The debate on monarchy, amongst other topics, particularly reveals the articulation of this tradition, which, in proposing a multiplicity of different interpretations (for and against the institution of a king) according to the sceptical method, actually serves to threaten its authority. This Jewish political tradition (and its texts), however, did not remain confined to the Jewish world, but it was widely spread within Christian political thought in the Early Modern period. We can identify the sixteenth century as the age when the interest in Jewish political history grew exponentially. Scholars today agree that Calvinism played a central role in the development and spread of the Jewish political tradition within the Christian world. It would be interesting to reconsider the contribution that Jewish thought made to the Christian world, analysing within these works the role played by the Jewish sceptical method in investigating political authority. The main purpose is to show how the Jewish debate about kingship contributes to re-enforcing the desacralisation of the figure of the king, which began with the English revolution.

Guido Bartolucci is assistant professor of early modern history at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Calabria.

Junior Fellow: October 2015–December 2016

Research Project: Yeshayahu Leibowitz—Strict Orthodox Practice and Unbound Scepticism

Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–94) was an Israeli scientist and religious thinker who exerted a con­siderable influence on the views of intellectuals as well as the wider public regarding religious, moral, and political issues. Amongst other publications, he has written a book on Maimonides’ faith. Roi Benbassat will explore Leibowitz’s sceptical approach to four interrelated themes: the legitimacy of scepticism in the Jewish religion, the conflict between reli­gion and science, the moral status of Judaism, and Judaism and the ‘Jew­ish state.’ Leibowitz’s challenging insights regarding ‘religious knowl­edge’ has granted him the title of ‘a destroyer of idols.’ In his view, the Jewish religion is defined by the institution of Halakha alone, namely by its system of duties, whereas any other feature of Judaism (beliefs in particular) is dismissible. Thus, Judaism is conceived as a normative system, and faith in it as a commitment to a legal system. Lei­bowitz’s sceptical attitude is drawn in various depictions of his concept of Judaism. He argues that Jewish faith is a volitional decision that does not rely on any belief or reasoning. He also claims that Jewish faith is essentially in conflict with humanism and other moral standpoints. His sceptical attitude goes as far as claiming that God’s existence cannot be as­sumed or justified by our cognitive capacities, but only by willingly accepting the authority of the Jewish law (Halakhah). The Torah, as he puts it, is ‘data preceding recognition of the Giver of the Torah.’

Roi Benbassat earned his PhD at Université de Paris 1 and Tel Aviv University. Before coming to Hamburg, he held a Minerva Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at Free University Berlin.

Senior Fellow: October 2016–March 2017

Research Project: What is Zetetic Political Philosophy? The Case of Leo Strauss

Harald Bluhm’s contribution will consist of two parts. The first is a review essay on the differences between the recent American and German literature on Leo Strauss. In the US, Strauss’s thinking is a matter of political and philosophical debate, while in Germany there is no academic school of Straussians, nor a political wing of Straussianism. Starting from this observation, Bluhm will shed light on how the American and German literature interprets Strauss’ political philosophy. Strauss’ scepticism, inherent in his philosophical return to Plato and Socrates, will arise as an essential question. The second contribution is a paper on when and how Strauss coined and used the term ‘zetetic.’ Bluhm will analyse the way Straussians developed this term as a label for his political philosophy. Bluhm aims to clarify the distinctive character of Strauss’ understanding of ‘zetetic’ political phi­losophy as a kind of sceptic prima philosophia. The starting point for his research is the current increase in literature and journals devoted to ‘zetetic philosophy.’ In discussing these subjects, Bluhm will focus on the differences between ze­tetic, sceptic, relativist, and historicist approaches.

Harald Bluhm is professor for political theory and history of ideas at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.

Senior Fellow: October 2016–March 2017

Research Project: A Case of Ethical Scepticism in the Fourteenth Century: Francesco Petrarca

Teresa Caligiure’s research project will investigate the ancient sources of the sceptical attitude present in the philosophical and moral writings of Francesco Petrarca. The cultural debates around these sources, which were held between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries, have greatly influenced the thinking of Humanism during the Renais­sance in Italy and Europe. The appearance of a ‘sceptical Petrarca’ in his work, will not only touch upon the ethical individual, but also contextualise it with regard to the political situation in which he lived and worked. This project will address the issue of scepticism in Petrarca’s works, particu­larly in the Secretum, the De ignorantia, the preface to the second book of the De remediis, in some letters and other works. It is worth investigating how Petrarca retains Augustinian ideas, according to which doubt turns into dialogue between man and the truth. As is shown in Petrarca’s controversial work De ignorantia, his point of view is polemically in contrast to the acceptance of Aristotelian prin­ciples and radical Averroism en vogue during his time.

Teresa Caligiure earned her PhD in medieval Italian literature in 2011. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Humanities Faculty of the University of Calabria (2013–15), where she taught lan­guage skills.

Senior Fellow: July–September 2016 and July–September 2017

Research Project: Don Isaac Abravanel and the Role of Sceptical Arguments in the Delimitation of Religion

Cedric Cohen-Skalli’s research project will focus on the new delimitation of the realms of religion and science suggested by Isaac Abravanel in his philosophical and exegetical works written in the historical context of the Iberian and Italian peninsulas in the fifteenth century. Cohen-Skalli believes that this new delimitation of religion and science, shared by many Jewish philosophers of the fifteenth century, can be best studied in the works of Isaac Abravanel, since they display their Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and Greco-Roman background more explicitly than most other works of fifteenth-century Jewish philosophers. Cohen-Skalli’s intention is to show how this new delimitation of religion and science is grounded on sceptical claims on the limitation of human knowledge and on the uncertainty of scien­tific models. These sceptical claims play an essential role in the de­limitation of the realm of religion and its distinction from scientific epistemological models. The sceptical argumentation often func­tions as a discursive justification and prepara­tion for a more fideistic or literal approach to religious events like miracles or prophe-cy in Abravanel’s work. The sceptical ar­guments used by Abravanel are not meant to invalidate either science or philosophy, but to justify the possi­bility of religious events defined as ‘supernatural.’ The sceptical argumen­tation that Abravanel developed has of­ten been approached by modern scholar­ship as marking the end of medieval Jewish philosophy (Leo Strauss) or as a sign of Jewish backwardness vis-à-vis early modern rationalism (Benzion Netanyahu). Cedric Cohen-Skalli’s hopes to demonstrate that Isaac Abravanel’s disjunction of the realms of religion and science participated in the re-definition of religion, philosophy, and science in the Early Modern period.

Cedric Cohen-Skalli teaches early modern and modern Jewish philosophy at the University of Haifa.

Junior Fellow: March–August 2017

Research Project: The Philosophical Significance of Negative Theology

Philosophical scepticism and negative theology are both concerned with the limits of language and thought. Particularly, in their deepest and historically most influential forms, both traditions are best under­stood not as a species of philosophical thesis, but rather as some­thing that enables a particular form of experience and self-trans­formation with respect to these limits. According to Pyrrhonism, sceptical distur­bances lead to the attitude of ataraxia, or tranquility. A similar therapeutic under­standing of scepticism can be found, for example, in the works of Lud­wig Wittgenstein, Thompson Clarke, and Stanley Cavell. On the other hand, negative theology is traditionally under­stood as a via negativa, a way to a deeper form of faith. This can be found in the writ­ings of the main representatives of negative theology as Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita, Maimonides or Nicholas of Cusa. By means of a com­parison of scepticism and negative theology, this project investigates the respective strategies of a non-theoretical, performative representation of the limits of language and thought. This will contribute to a better understanding of these limits and, thus, demonstrate the philosophical significance of negative theology.

Rico Gutschmidt received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Bonn in 2009. In 2016, he worked as a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago on a research project on scepticism.

Junior Fellow: October 2016–September 2017

Research Project: Scepticism and the Limits of Knowledge in the Thought of the Indian Buddhist Philosopher Vasubandhu

• Philosophical Scepticism and the Authority of Scriptures: Vasubandhu as a Case Study (October 2016–March 2017)
• Buddhist Dialectics as a Sceptical Medium in the Works of Vasubandhu (April–September 2017)

Like other religious and philosophical traditions, Buddhism has questioned the reliability of our knowledge and its sources. The present study examines the issue of philosophical scepticism towards truths in the works of the Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu (late fourth to early fifth century CE), as expressed in two mediums of investigation: scriptural commentary and philosophical debate. The first part of the research examines the fundamen­tal tension between critical ra­tional inquiry and the reliance on the authority of scriptural testimony. It addresses a set of questions concerning the interplay between the two, specifically how they are used to extract knowledge from religious texts. This analysis relies primarily on Vasubandhu’s Vyākhyā-yukti and Dharma-dharmatā-vibhāga-vṛtti. The second part of the study examines Vasubandhu’s employment of dialectics or debate (vāda) as a literary style and as a means to arrive at reliable knowledge. Examining a number of case studies from the Abhidharma-kośa-bhāṣya and the Viṃśikā, as well as instructions given in debate manuals such as the Vāda-vidhi, this part of the study aims to investigate what types of knowledge can be reached through the dialectical method, and also what the limits and shortcomings of this method are.

Oren Hanner completed his PhD at the Numata Center for Buddhist Studies at the University of Hamburg in 2016, with a dissertation on the no­tion of moral agency in the thought of the Buddhist thinker Vasubandhu.

Senior Fellow: July–August 2016, July–August 2017, and July–August 2019

Research Project: Dream Enquiry: Theory and Praxis of Dreaming in Medieval and Early Modern Judaism

Yuval Harari will work on a chapter of his planned book about a branch of Jewish magic dealing with practices for manipulating dreams. The primary sources for his research are Jewish manuscripts of magic and practical Kabbalah, in which practices of dream magic are ex­plicit and abundant. He will also consider and include Halakhic, Kabbalistic, and narrative sources. Both dreams and magic undermine the borderlines of nature and society and are in conflict with ‘rational’ interpretations of the human expe­rience. Despite engendering scepticism and ridicule, they re­tained a strong hold on Jewish communities, both East and West. ‘Dream enquiry,’ which seems to have been a prevalent practice in the medieval and early modern periods, is an especially interesting test case for this debate. Dream request, or better, dream enquiry, is the most common pattern of magic dream divination in Jewish cul­ture. The most significant source for understanding this practice, the worldview in which it was anchored, and the criticism and disdain it raised, are the dozens of recipes for dream enquiry scattered in the broad and yet unexplored corpus of Jewish manuscripts of magic and practical Kabbalah from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. Yuval Harari’s research will focus first and foremost on this corpus, aiming at a comprehen­sive survey of the phenomenon and its place in Jewish thought and action.

Yuval Harari teaches Jewish thought and folklore at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Senior Fellow: February–March 2017, February–March 2018, and October–November 2018

Research Project: Hasdai Crescas’ Sceptical Critique of Maimonides

In his Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides (1138–1204) anchored Jewish religion in Aristotelian science and philosophy. Rabbi Ḥasdai Crescas (c. 1340–1410 or 1411), in his Light of the Lord, pre­sented a radical critique of Aristotelian physics and metaphysics and rejected Maimonides’ ap­proach. According to him, human reason can prove the existence of a first cause, but cannot prove God’s unity or goodness, that is, it cannot prove the personal God of the Bible. Religion, he argues, is based on prophecy, not philosophy. Crescas’ critique is analysed in H. A. Wolfson’s Crescas’ Critique of Aristotle (1929). Crescas argues against Aristotle’s theories of space, time, the impossibility of a vacuum, and the impossibility of actual infinity. His sceptical arguments are based on a critical exam­ination of Aristotle, Averroes (1126–98), Maimonides (1138–1204), and Gersonides (1288–1344). They show an affinity with Nicole Oresme (1320–82). Instead of Aristotle’s closed universe, Crescas conceived a universe infinite in space and time. His sceptical views left an impact on Spinoza.

Warren Zev Harvey is professor emeritus in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he has taught since 1977.

Junior Fellow: November 2016–January 2017 and July–September 2017

Research Project: From Descartes’ Doubt to Bruce Nauman’s Sensual Praxis

Adi Louria Hayon’s research project centres on the relationship between modern art and philos­ophy, in particular on how we may consider the art of American artist Bruce Nauman through René Descartes’ methodological scepticism. The question at hand is whether post-minimalist art may offer a systematic process akin to methodological scepticism in order to afford us an insight into the questions of the existence of external reality and the finite nature of objective knowl­edge. Allying himself with the sceptic, from the late 1960s Nauman began developing a practice that exposes the contraptions of sense perception through a series of methods that include the impediment of visual apparatuses, failures, blinding mechanisms, chance operations, and a turn to the sonorous, a sense considered minor in the plastic arts. Focusing on the nature of knowledge and its production, this project will address the issue of methodic doubt by investigating the concepts of anamorphic images and distortions in relation to the operation of perspective and the problem of illusionism; the concept of self-deception in relation to technology and instrumentality; and the concept of suspension of judgment as a solution to the enactment of false knowledge and a threat to freedom.

Adi Louria Hayon is an assistant professor in the Art History Department at Tel Aviv University. She earned her doctorate at University of Toronto in 2013.

Senior Fellow: April–September 2017

Research Project: Sceptical Motifs in Judah Halevi’s Kuzari

Ehud Krinis seeks to explore various sceptical motifs in Judah Halevi’s twelfth-century Judaeo-Arabic dialogue, commonly known as the Book of Kuzari or the Kuzari. These sceptical motifs include, among others, Halevi’s criticism of rational contemplation (iʿtibār) and inductive reason­ing (istidlāl); the preference of the "naturally gifted persons (al-maṭbūʿūn)," who receive religious truths by sparks of inspiration, over the non-gifted, who need to immerse themselves in study in order to acquire the articles of faith; and the supremacy of religious understanding gained by direct experience over that gained through discourse. Krinis hopes to demonstrate that Halevi’s scepticism is intriguing and provoking, not only in the ways in which he uses it in the Kuzari to tackle his opponents’ approaches, but even more so in the ways he directs it at approach­es espoused by his spokesman in the dialogue: the Jewish sage (habr/ haver). By pursuing this direction of in­vestigation, Krinis ventures to claim that Halevi’s scepticism culminates in implicitly calling into question the usefulness of the discursive format of his own Kuzari.

Ehud Krinis earned his PhD at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (2008). He was a fellow at the Center for the Study of Conver­sion and Inter-Religious Encounters at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2015–16.

Junior Fellow: August 2017, August 2018, and August 2019

Research Project: Reason and Revelation: Sceptical Aspects in Judah Halevi's Kuzari

Ariel Malachi's project deals with Aristotelian logic and epistemology, their sceptical use by religious thinkers to criticise philosophy, and their impact on the thinker's religious standpoints. At this stage, the study focuses on Judah Halevi's sceptical criticism of Aristotelian philosophy and its function within his defence of Judaism as presented in his Book of The Kuzari. At the heart of the research is the suggestion that for Halevi, the same logical, epistemological, and sceptical philosophy-criticising approach brings one to rule rationally in favour of Jewish revelation. This innovative suggestion, based on careful and critical reading of the original Judeo-Arabic text, attempts to reconstruct Halevi's attitude towards philosophy and rationalism, as well as its impact on the exegesis of revelation from a new perspective. Ariel Malachi's general plans are to expand his research and to explore the functions of logic and epistemology in the writings of other medieval Jewish thinkers, such as Abraham Ibn-Daud and Maimonides.

Ariel Malachi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Jewish Philosophy at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He is also a jurist, holding a Bachelor of Laws degree (LLB.) from Bar-Ilan University. He is a member of the Israel Bar Association and is licensed to practice as a lawyer.

Senior Fellow: April–June 2017 and October–December 2017

Research Project: Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss on “Jewish Scepticism”

There is a standard narrative about Hannah Arendt. She was a sceptic regarding human rights: from the early 1940s on, she insisted in her writings that universalised human rights ignored the difference between humanity and humankind, and that because of this ignorance, human rights were defending an abstract idea of human beings. As a consequence, Arendt invoked the formulation ‘the right to have rights” as the one true human right. “The right to have rights” has become part of the standard repertoire of current debates about refugees, statelessness, and the struggles of modern democracies.
However, nobody has defined the meaning of “sceptic” or “scepticism” here, or explored it in greater detail. It is at this crucial point that my research project begins. If Arendt was indeed a sceptic, what made her philosophically sceptical? Answers to these questions will form the foundation for three inquiries that are essential to my research project:

1. To what degree is Arendt’s “scepticism” a response to the Holocaust and its consequences?

2. Can similarly sceptical reactions to the Holocaust and its consequences be found in other Jewish thinkers of her generation?

3. If there are such similarities, would it not be necessary to address this particular scepticism as a new form of Jewish scepticism and to define it more precisely?

Thomas Meyer obtained his doctorate (2003) and completed his Habilitation (2009) at LMU, Munich. After that, he received several fellowships and visiting- and guest-professorships at the University of Graz, the ETH Zurich, the University of Chicago, Vanderbilt University, Wake Forest University, Boston University, Erlangen University, and the University of Hamburg.

Junior Fellow: March 2016–February 2017

Research Project: Linguistic Scepticism

• From Isolation to Community. Sceptical Strategies in Landauer’s Anarchy (March–August 2016)
• Limits of Language. Limits of Understanding. Linguistic Scepticism in Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein (September 2016–February 2017)

Libera Pisano’s research is structured into two main sections and deals with linguistic scepticism among pairings of German-Jewish thinkers of the last century: Mauthner/Landauer and Rosenzweig/Wittgen­stein. The historical context is the so-called Sprachkrise, a complex critique of language diffused in the philosophical and literary de­bate before World War I. In her first six months of research, Libera Pisano analysed the logos-scepticism in Mauthner’s philosophy as the theoretical premise of the anarchist thought of Gustav Landauer by shed­ding light on the turn of linguistic scepticism into a political praxis and a mystical conception of community. For the second part of her research, she has chosen to investigate the different ap­proaches of Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein as two manifestations of the constellation of Sprachkrise, which—despite their apparent divergences—is the common thread linking these different authors. Libera Pisano will attempt to show how reflection about the limits of language, the relevance of the apophatic moment, the critical attitude towards the tradition, and the new task of philosophy—the main features of both Rosenzweig’s and Wittgenstein’s thought—stem from the radical linguistic scepticism present in the cultural debate of that time.

Libera Pisano earned her PhD in theoretical philosophy at Sapienza University of Rome in 2014. She was visiting research fellow (post-doc) at the Humboldt University Berlin in 2014–15.

Senior Fellow: July–September 2016 and July–September 2017

Research Project: Scepticism and Anti-Scepticism in the Jewish Intellectual Debate of Nineteenth-Century Italy

Asher Salah’s project focuses on the context and the uses of the term ‘sceptic’ in the writings of Italian rabbis in the nineteenth century. Scepticism appears to be a central topic in the debate concerning the Jewish Reform, playing a crucial role in the revival of the anti-Karaitic polemic in nineteenth-century Italian Judaism. The interest in recovering classical defences of Jewish oral law is attested by the numerous translations into Italian of the Mate Dan by David Nieto, by the renewed interest in the commentaries of Yehudah Halevi’s Kuzari, and by the proliferation of self-defined ‘anti-Karaitic’ tractates, targeting not only contemporary deist philosophies and religious reforms, but first and foremost positivistic systems of disbelief and secularism. At the same time, Italian rabbis in the nineteenth century engaged in an unprecedented programme of dogmatic interpretation of Judaism. The debate concerning scepticism sheds new light upon the Jewish response to modernity and emancipation in Italy, the challenges to rabbinical authority, the convergence of Catholic and Jewish apologetics in the frame of a growing estrangement from religious practices, and the continuities and discontinuities with previous Jewish philo­sophical traditions.

Asher Salah is a senior lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He was a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in 2011–12 and in 2014–15.

Senior Fellow: October 2016–March 2017

Research Project: The Structure of Reasons and Grounds: Scepticism and the Principle of Sufficient Reason

One of the most influential arguments in favour of scepticism relies on the structure of reason­hood: in order to classify as knowledge, a belief must be supported by a reason. In order to lend robust support to a belief, however, a reason must itself be supported by another reason. But since we have finite minds, any sequence of reasons we can entertain comes to a halt some­where and terminates in a reason which is itself unsupported by any further reason. This seems to show that none of our beliefs enjoy the sort of support that is required for the belief to count as knowledge. The current project explores the basic assumptions behind this argu­ment by diving deeper into theories of reasons and their structure. The topic will be approached with a focus on the traditional debate about the so-called Principle of Sufficient Reason, examining con­tributions from philosophers such as Baruch de Spinoza, Christian Crusius, Salomon Maimon, and Bernard Bolzano.

Benjamin Schnieder is professor for the­oretical philosophy at the University of Hamburg, where he is also the direc­tor of the Phlox research group.

Junior Fellow: July 2017

Research Project: On the Paradoxical Scepticism Which Lies at the Core of Joseph Ben Shalom Ashkenazi’s Scientific-Kabbalistic System of Thought

The goal of my research project will be to decipher the implicit paradox that lies at the foundation of Rabbi Joseph Ben Shalom Ashkenazi's system of thought (circa 1300). Ashkenazi's magnum opus, a commentary on the Book of Creation, became a canonical text in Kabbalistic circles. The commentary explains, in a confluence of scientific zeitgeist and Kabbalah, the creation of God, the creation of the world, the creation of man, and man as creator. Ashkenazi's commentary is unique in that he incorporates fundamental ideas from philosophy, astrology, and medicine into his Kabbalistic system of thought. Ashkenazi claims astrology to be fickle, and yet pins the secret of the Messiah to the star of Saturn. He calls philosophers heretics who make fundamental mistakes, and yet he sees the need to incorporate Aristotle's formless matter into a complex mystical system of thought. Furthermore, Ashkenazi goes to great pains to use examples from medicine and human anatomy in order to explain life, yet claims that doctors do not understand what happens at birth, or what death is about. With such extreme scepticism and the constant questioning of the reliability of scientific forms of knowledge, I will try to explain why Ashkenazi makes such a comprehensive use of these in his commentary.

Jonnie Schnytzer is a PhD student in Bar-Ilan University's Department of Jewish Philosophy, with a focus on medieval Kabbalistic manuscripts. He is working on a first critical edition of Rabbi Joseph Ben Shalom Ashkenazi's commentary on Sefer Yetzirah (turn of the thirteenth century, Castalia). 

Junior Fellow: October 2016–March 2017

Research Project: Plato and the Art of Academic Scepticism

Charles E. Snyder’s project explains why both doctrinal and anti-doctrinal interpretations of Plato fail to identify the art of Plato’s sceptical philosophy. His project recovers and enlarges a third paradigm of interpreting Plato that conforms to the way the sceptical Academy received his dialogues. Snyder argues that the doctrinal interpretation fails to explain why Plato cast phil­osophical arguments and beliefs in the form of dramatic dialogues, not treatises; the anti-doc­trinal paradigm, on the other hand, cannot discern the practical knowledge, or the non-doctrinal know-how, exhibited by Socrates in the activity of philosophical inquiry. For Snyder, the many dif­ficulties that emerge from the demand for definitions (e.g. virtue in the Meno, knowledge in the Theaetetus, temperance in the Charmides, courage in the Laches) find a positive solution in the art of Socrates’ dialectic. In the give and take of argument, Socrates exhibits the practical knowl­edge that virtue and knowledge are irreducible to propositions, definitions, and demonstrations. Arcesilaus the sceptic is primarily a practitioner of this art, emulating Socrates in challenging the conceited dogmatism of other philosophers. This means, for Snyder’s project, that Arcesilaus exhibits non-proposi­tional knowledge by showing that virtue and knowledge cannot be defined or proven. Part three of the project argues that the modern tradition of interpreting Academic scepticism according to a narrow scheme of pure episte­mology is fundamentally flawed, distorting the character and virtue of scepticism in antiquity.

Charles Synder earned a PhD in philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In 2015–16, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center, and a teaching fellow at the Bard Prison Initiative in New York.

Senior Fellow: April–May 2017

Research Project: Ancient Scepticism, Its Philosophical Self-Justification, and Its Polemical Tools: contra dogmaticos, sed pro sceptica philosophia

This project aims to offer a first analysis towards a general introduction to Sextus’ Pyrrhonian philosophy. Accordingly, it will pursue the following goals:

• A global picture of the self-justification of his ‘movement’ (see especially the first book of his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, chs. 1–30);
• A new philosophical attention to the relationship between some dogmatic assumptions about the notions of truth and the practical consequences they can or should have;
• A running commentary that reveals some crucial aspects of the Pyrrhonian attack against any kind of subsistence of the demonstration/ἀπόδειξις;
• An analysis of those passages where Sextus attacks some notions of dogmatic logical doctrines, for example: division, whole/parts, genera/species;
• Finally, the research will focus on a more global topic, namely the destruction of any rea­sonable concept of the body as well as the soul, both considered as basic components of human beings in their capacity of acting as alleged criteria of truth

Emidio Spinelli is a full professor of the history of ancient philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Sapienza Università di Roma.

Senior Fellow: November 2016, January–March 2017 and May 2017

Research Project: Maimonides’ Sceptical Critique of Prophecy and the Parable of the Aqedah

Josef Stern’s objective is to complete a monograph on Maimonides’ sceptical critique of prophecy. According to Maimonides, prophecy is an ideal state of intellectual perfection yielding a ‘knowledge’ whose representations are a function of both the intellect and the imagination, a state articulated in the Torah by the condition that all (non-Mosaic) prophecy must occur in a dream or vision. This characterisation immediately raises an epistemological question: with respect to any given prophetically apprehended proposition, how does the purported prophet know that he intellectually apprehended its content, which in turn is represented in an imagi­native form, and that he did not instead imagine that he intellectually apprehended that con­tent? An answer would require a criterion for distinguishing objects of the intellect from those of the imagination. However, Maimonides argues that humans have no such criterion, leaving him at a sceptical impasse, unable to justify his claim to knowledge. This, Stern argues, is what Maimonides means by the challenge posed by ‘false’—deceived rather than deceiving—prophets. To explore this, Stern analyses Maimonides’ idea of prophecy, prophetic verification, and prophetic intuition (hads), the tension for him between the intellect and imagination in light of the major dispute over the status of the modalities among the Arabic phi­losophers, his critique of the epistemic status of the certainty of the prophet, and the normative consequences of this sceptical critique for the prophetic life and commandments.

Josef Stern is William H. Colvin Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Chicago.

Junior Fellow: January–August 2017 and September–December 2018

Research Project: Scepticism and religion in the Hellenistic age and beyond

Ancient Greek sceptics insisted that one should not hastily accept philosophical tenets in place of customary beliefs and practices, since restructuring one’s life around philosophical dogma would lead to a deplorable life of the mind and to an unappealing way of living. Instead, one should continue to investigate in the hope of eventually getting it right, and base one’s actions, until the results are in, on the customs and laws of one’s land. In his dissertation, Máté Veres examined the role of such sceptical arguments concerning theol­ogy in selected works of Cicero and Sextus Empiricus. After providing a close reading of relevant passages, Veres situated their position in the broader context of the purpose and methodology of sceptical argumentation. In Hamburg, Veres will prepare papers based on his results, and broad­en the scope of the sources discussed. He hopes that his stay will contribute to the preparation of a monograph on the role of scepticism in Hellenistic theological debates. Furthermore, Veres will return to a topic that partly motivated him to take up his research: David Hume’s philosophy of religion and the influence of classical scepticism on his philosophical outlook. Veres aims to argue in a paper that Hume engages with, and eventually transforms, the ancient sceptical legacy.

Máté Veres is a PostDoc candidate from the Central European Univer­sity. During his studies, he was a visiting student at the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge, a Fulbright visiting graduate researcher at the Sage School of Philosophy, Cornell Uni­versity, a junior bursary recipient at the Hardt Foundation, and a junior fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

Senior Fellow:

Research Project: Scepticism and the JTB Account of Knowledge

The so-called JTB account of knowledge states that knowledge is a kind of belief, namely, belief that is true and justified. In a famous paper, Edmund Gettier (1963) observes that the JTB ac­count is taken more or less for granted across different positions in epistemology. Arguably, this applies to positions throughout many centuries. In this project, Katja Vogt aims to show that the JTB account came to be established in epistemological theories that take knowledge of God as their primary concern, and that it owes much of its intuitiveness to the tradition of seeking to know God. In this tradition, scepticism takes the form of what Vogt calls Belief Scepticism: scepticism introduced as a method for distancing oneself from beliefs, and ultimately validating beliefs that are antecedently held. Here, the JTB account is a nat­ural fit. In making this argument, Vogt is con­tinuing her ongoing research on scepticism, including work on the differences between ancient and later scepticism, as well as a more recent project (co-authored with Jens Haas) on the nature of ignorance.

Katja Maria Vogt is professor of phi­losophy at Columbia University, New York.

Senior Fellow: April–September 2017

Research Project: Scepticism and Schematism: The Logotectonic Progress of Transcendental Scepticism from Moses Mendelssohn to Salomon Maimon

The period between Kant’s sceptical refutation of Moses Mendelssohn’s reification of metaphysics and Salomon Maimon’s scepticist meta-critique of Kant’s critical transcendentalism seems to be one of the most fruitful periods of scepticism, albeit not fully illuminated in its inner logic of ar­gumentation. Dirk Westerkamp’s research project seeks to examine the debates and arguments of transcendentalism’s encounter with scepticism in the early 1790s. Emphasis is thus given to the logotectonic (that is: rational) struc­ture of philosophical and sceptical reasoning during the period be­tween Mendelssohn’s Morgenstunden and Maimon’s Neue Logik (1785–1794/5). The project will thus focus on the relationship between rationality, symbolic language, and schematism in Mendelssohn, Kant, Jacobi, Reinhold, and Maimon. The pro­ject shall result in a text of some 150 pages, which will form the core chapters of a book on the topic.

Dirk Westerkamp is professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Kiel. He has been a research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, at Harvard University, and at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences.