Fellows and Research Projects: 2021–20

Junior Fellow: October 2020–July 2021 and March–June 2022

Research Project: Experience, Intuition and Understanding: Sources of Knowledge and Scepticism in Maimon’s Commentary on Bacon’s Novum Organum

This project explores how various sources of knowledge produce new propositions in Salomon Maimon’s philosophy and how his sceptical stance shapes his thought about the formulation of new knowledge. More particularly, it examines Maimon’s commentary on Bacon’s Novum Organum and his intellectual shift from knowledge based on experience to the invention of a priori knowledge based on intuition and understanding. This shift is motivated by his scepticism. The project will examine the logical foundations of knowledge grounded on empirical inventions and discoveries and will present the advantages of turning to empirical knowledge over speculative philosophy. Furthermore, it will show how induction can be used to decrease the level of doubt and increase the level of certainty of empirical knowledge.

Idit Chikurel received her PhD from the School of Philosophy, Linguistics and Science Studies and the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel-Aviv University in 2019.

Senior Fellow: April–August 2021

Research Project: Islamic Theology

Heidrun Eichner’s project investigates reconfigurations of arguments regarding the validity of prophecy as a source of knowledge in early modern Islamic authors. Arguments questioning the authority of prophets have been discussed in the classical tradition of Islamic theology for centuries. For some authors, this is a merely academic discussion of a stock of arguments and an intellectual exercise inherited from tradition, whereas for others, these arguments are used as an important tool in their engagement with contemporary debates. The focus of the project will be on how inspiration as a source of authority is negotiated in such constellations and how this relates to arguments from the theological tradition in a narrower sense. A starting point will be early modern mystical texts from the Ottoman empire (eighteenth century onwards), where Māturīdite traditions convey an attitude to inspiration that clearly stands in conflict with how al-Ghazālī’s influential mystical writings frame inspiration as a source of knowledge from an Ashʿarī point of view. Additionally, the transformations of this attitude will be followed through the commentary literature that evolved around it.

Heidrun Eichner holds a chair of Islamic studies at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen.

Senior Fellow: April–August 2021

Research Project: Contemplation: Champions and Critics

This project proposes a historical and systematic study of the ideal of theoria (contemplation) and three sceptical challenges that were raised against it: one epistemological, one metaphysical, and one theological. Aristotle argues that if we pay to see theatrical plays or wrestling matches, then we should enjoy contemplating the universe all the more: it’s a better show, and what more, it’s free! The project will work out the metaphysical and cosmological premises that ground the ideal of contemplation: a view of the universe as ordered by a divine mind (nous, ‘aql, sekhel) that the human mind can attach itself to by grasping that order; in Maimonides’s words, the intellectual love of God which arises when we grasp God’s wisdom in the order of nature. The ideal of the contemplative life, then, assumes that we can attain knowledge and that knowledge connects the human being and the divine mind. The best-known challenge to this ideal is that of the Sceptics, who argue that human reason is too weak to attain knowledge. However, there are two additional challenges. Firstly, the Epicureans, who argue that the universe is the outcome of blind, mechanical causes and that although knowledge of the natural order is possible, it has no intrinsic value. Secondly, proponents of divine voluntarism (e.g., al-Ghazālī) argue that the divine will, not the divine mind, orders the universe, and hence grasping that order is neither possible nor a path to connect with God. This project will seek to trace both the ideal of the contemplative life and the challenges to it from antiquity to the nineteenth century, with a special focus on Jewish philosophers from Maimonides to Spinoza. In addition, it aims to examine links between the three challenges sketched above and competing concepts of the human good—grounded, for example, in faith or in mystical experience.

Carlos Fraenkel has been the James McGill Professor (joint appointment in the Departments of Philosophy and Jewish Studies) at McGill University in Montreal since 2016.

Senior Fellow: April–August 2021

Research Project: Scepticism in the History of Indian Philosophy and the Role of the Ninth-Century Philosopher Jayarāśi

The aim of this project is threefold. First, it aims to clarify the notion of scepticism in relation to the Indian philosophical tradition. As is well known, in South Asia, scepticism did not form an independent tradition or even a philosophical school by itself, and philosophers with disparate affiliations, such as Madhyamaka Buddhism, Lokāyata materialism, and Advaita Vedānta monism, have been labelled sceptics in various studies of Indian philosophical thought. I will argue that Jayarāśi’s Tattvopalavasiṃha (“The lion that makes havoc to [all philosophical] principles”), which was probably composed some time in the ninth century, is the only surviving work in the history of Indian philosophy that can be considered sceptical in the proper sense of the term, in contradistinction to its use to designate ontological nihilism and illusionism. The second aim is to study Jayarāśi’s position on reasoning and his philosophy of language, two issues that have been hitherto neglected in modern scholarship. Finally, the project will provide a critical survey of the growing body of literature on Jayarāśi that has emerged during the last two decades.

Eli Franco is professor of Indology at Universität Leipzig.

Senior Fellow: April–August 2021

Research Project: The Long Life of Scientific Non-Facts in Jewish Cultures: Ṣel ha-‘Olam (the Hebrew Adaptation of L’Image du monde; 1245) and Its Un/sceptical Readers in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

L’Image du monde was written in 1245 by Gossouin of Metz in French. A Hebrew version of it appeared in Amsterdam in 1733 under the title Ṣel ha-‘Olam. The text is a kind of encyclopedia that blends an exposition of Ptolemaic cosmology and with a great deal of fantastic lore about humankind and the fauna and flora in the three continents. Ten re-editions of Ṣel ha-‘Olam appeared during the nineteenth century, evincing a keen interest on the part of readers.
How did these Eastern European Jewish readers receive this text six hundred years after it was composed? With what perspectives did they approach it? Were they aware of the fact that the book they read consisted of errors, even superstitions, wrapped in scientific garments? The project reviews the milieus in which the book was consumed and will analyse how it was perceived. Attitudes may be classified according to whether a writer read Ṣel ha-‘Olam (i) as a source of information about the world or (ii) as a source of inspiration for reflections about the relationship between man and the deity. The first group includes sceptics like the writer Mendele Mokher Seforim (1836–1917), who in his book Toldot ha-teva‘ (1862)—an adaptation of Harald Othmar Lenz’s Naturgeschichte (1834–1839)—castigated his coreligionists for their reading of books like Ṣel ha-‘Olam. In his The Travels of Benyamin the Third (1878), he ridiculed the naïveté of a common Jew who is fascinated by the marvels recounted in this book. The second group includes figures like R. Nathan b. Amram (1791–1870), who adopted several of Ṣel ha-‘Olam’s statements about the relationship between the deity and humankind.

Gad Freudenthal is a senior research fellow emeritus of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris.

Junior Fellow: October 2020–March 2021 (DEFERRED 2019–20)

Research Project: Scepticism and Kantianism: Salomon Maimon’s Reading of Kant

This project will analyse and critically assess Salomon Maimon’s engagement with Immanuel Kant. From the perspective of Maimon’s account of different sources of (purported) knowledge, the Kantian system amounts to an ultimately unsatisfactory combination of “empirical dogmatism” and “rational scepticism.” Building on existing research on Maimon––research that has taken a mostly Maimon-immanent perspective so far––this project will take a distinctive, more Kant-oriented, approach: it explores (in detail) the relationship that Maimon’s views bear to those of other early readers of Kant (most notably Gottlob Ernst Schulze) and places a special emphasis on the connections between Maimon’s criticism and questions figuring prominently in current Kant scholarship. The project consists of two subprojects focusing on (i) Maimon’s treatment of the Kantian thing-in-itself and (ii) Maimon’s criticism of Kant’s refutation of Hume. Through this distinctive approach, it seeks to argue against some influential existing accounts of both (i) and (ii) and to develop a more realist interpretation of Maimon’s views, adding to our understanding of Maimon’s thinking, its place in the history of philosophy, and its importance for contemporary Kantianism.

Marialena Karampatsou will be a postdoctoral fellow in 2020–21. She received her PhD from the Department of Philosophy at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Senior Fellow: October–December 2020

Research Project: Spinoza’s Epistemological Scepticism and Its Classical Arabic Sources

The question of the role of images, imagination, and imaginative knowledge in the epistemological process was already of great importance in classical Arabic-Islamic and Judeo-Arabic philosophy. In the works of numerous thinkers of this period, it had a specific epistemological function in the framework of prophetic knowledge. This is a reflection on the reception, adoption, and adaptation of Aristotelian epistemology and psychology in classical Arabic philosophy. In these texts, the knowledge that images and the imagination must provide in the process of prophetic cognition is supposed to lead to a surplus of knowledge and especially to an extended cognition of God. Interestingly, this line of argumentation can be seen in the writings of Arabic-Islamic Aristotelian and non-Aristotelian thinkers, as well as in the works of Judeo-Arabic Aristotelian and non-Aristotelian authors—such as, for example, Ibn Sīnā or Al-Ghazālī—and in their Judeo-Arabic recipients Halevi and Maimonides. Spinoza’s understanding of images and imagination seems to be in dialogue with these medieval approaches, as the nineteenth-century author Manuel Joel pointed out in relation to Maimonides’s account. It is therefore worth considering whether his concept of imagination is an example of the transfer of knowledge from classical Arabic philosophy to modernity and, if so, what parts of it become transformed in this process. Furthermore, this concept appears to form one of the links between Spinoza’s different works.

Beate Ulrike La Sala has been a postdoctoral research and teaching associate at the Institute of Philosophy and the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 980 at Freie Universität Berlin since 2012.

Senior Fellow: March–July 2021

Research Project: Questioning the Traditional Sources of Religious Truth in Enlightenment England

Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England witnessed several attacks on the politically demarcated boundaries of faith. Unitarians like Stephen Nye and Arthur Bury, the empiricist philosopher John Locke, the natural philosopher Isaac Newton and his associates William Whiston and Samuel Clarke, and deists and freethinkers such as John Toland, Anthony Collins, and Matthew Tindal rejected ecclesiastical tradition, denounced the pagan, Platonic, and scholastic corruptions of Christianity, and exposed priestcraft. Despite their different aims and methods, their Christian primitivism led them to reinterpret the early documents of Christianity and thus to relocate the source of belief from public authority to the epistemological criteria of individual reason, conscience, and scholarship. This research project will focus on these heterodox authors’ attempts to rediscover primitive Christianity, their Socinian and Arminian influences, their intellectual context, and their different conclusions concerning the Christian religion and the relationship between God and humanity. The analysis will also consider the impact of their historical, hermeneutical, and theological reflections on subsequent generations of heterodox thinkers, particularly on the deists and sceptics of the mid-eighteenth century.

Diego Lucci is a professor of philosophy and history at the American University in Bulgaria.

Senior Fellow: September–October 2019 and July–September 2021

Research Project: A Jew in the Fringe: Richard H. Popkin’s Views on Judaism and Scepticism in His Correspondence with Judah Goldin

Popkin’s scholarly interest in Judaism appeared late in his academic career, only from the sixties onwards, after what Popkin described as an “overpowering religious experience.” Recent scholarship on Jewish scepticism has rightly stressed that Popkin’s multifarious ouvre lacks of an articulated reflection concerning a specifically Jewish current within the sceptical tradition, independent from the Converso encounter with classical philosophy and Christian theology.
However, Popkin’s personal papers and archives shed light on research fields that he cultivated which did not find adequate representation in his published oeuvre, i.e., the origins of European racism, Jewish–Christian relations, Jewish emancipation, Zionism and religious fundamentalism. Among Popkin’s correspondents, his life-long friend Judah Goldin (1914–98), an internationally renowned scholar of rabbinic literature, stands out as his main mentor and confidant for everything concerning Judaism, Israel, and his spiritual struggles. The Popkin–Goldin correspondence extends over almost forty years, from 1953 to 1997, and provides a new understanding of how Popkin’s self-perception as a Jew affected his scholarly interest in scepticism in the frame of Jewish intellectual history.

Asher Salah is an associate professor at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Senior Fellow: November 2020–March 2021

Research Project: Seeing the Sounds, Hearing the Colors: Moses Mendelssohn on Vision, Optics, and Geometry and Its Impact on Philosophy and Law

Moses Mendelssohn’s sceptical approach to philosophy and aesthetics has many different layers, one of which will be analysed in the framework of this project. His paradoxical dictum—“den Schall sehen, die Farben hören, oder den Hunger mit Fingern greifen” (Die Bildsäule, 1784)—points to an epistemic problem in science and philosophy. It contains in a nutshell the key question that this project intends to discuss, following in Mendelssohn’s footsteps: What are the procedures we use to systematise sensual perception in order to produce universal concepts, and how do these procedures—which mainly relate to the visual sense—deal with the dilemma of diversity in terms of sensual perception on the one hand and its dependence on particular, natural, and/or conventional languages on the other? This philosophical, aesthetical, and anthropological approach to the question of sense perception will be compared with the exegetical discussion of Ex 20.15 in Mendelssohn’s Bi’ur and beyond. When the people on Mount Sinai “see the sounds” of revelation, the paradox does not challenge the visual nature of science and philosophy, but rather points to the boundaries of human capability when it comes to the revelation events, testimonies, and laws handed down by Jewish tradition.

Before coming to Hamburg, Grit Schorch was a senior fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Senior Fellow: October 2020–February 2021

Research Project: Scepticism towards Progress among Modern Jewish Philosophers

The goal of the research project is a monograph entitled “Scepticism towards Progress among Modern Jewish Philosophers.”
The first part of this monograph deals with Jewish scepticism towards the Christian philosophy of history and has chapters on Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Samuel Hirsch, Nachman Krochmal, Franz Rosenzweig, and Karl Löwith. It is thematically centred on how these modern Jewish philosophers from Mendelssohn to Löwith—arguing disparately and in diverse discourses while pursuing the same argumentative thrust—sceptically opposed the basic character of the Christian and Christian-oriented secular philosophy of history (esp. Voltaire, Lessing, Kant, Hegel), viz. the idea that Christianity intellectually and morally overcame and supplanted Judaism in world history.
The second part deals with scepticism towards modern scientific, cultural, and technological progress (and the common belief in this progress) in the works of Jewish philosophers in the twentieth century. It has chapters on Theodor Lessing, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and  Theodor W. Adorno, Günther Anders, and Leo Strauss.

Christoph Schulte is professor of Jewish Studies and Philosophy at Universität Potsdam.

Junior Fellow: December 2019–November 2020

Research Project: Destruction, Knowledge, and Colonial Ethnography: Encounters with Colonial Scepticism

This research project is part of an ongoing broader project on pre-modern anthropological thinking and the emergence of ethnography in the Spanish, French, and English colonial realms between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Beyond its implications for the history of ethnographical practices, it will argue that this source base offers a distinct colonial perspective to our understanding of the genealogy of scientific doubt in modern thought. It aims to analyse how cultural encounters in America and Asia informed sceptical approaches by attempting to define a typology of scepticism found within ethnographical literature. Significantly, the increasing attention paid to anthropological evidence in Europe raised awareness of cultural diversity and bred scepticism regarding the existence of supposedly innate principles underlying human activities and beliefs. The growing recognition of diversity led to an epistemological change that expressed itself in dissatisfaction with existing analytical concepts for describing humankind. The objective is thus to connect the sceptical tradition to the transformation in the ways in which Europeans studied peoples and cultures (including Jews) during a period that coincided with both scientific advancement and the global discovery of humanity.

Ran Segev is a historian who specialises in knowledge culture and European colonial expansion in the early modern era. He completed his PhD at the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin (December 2015), specialising in colonial Latin America and the Atlantic world.

Junior Fellow: October 2020–September 2021

Research Project: Challenging Reason: Rabbinic Sceptics and Jewish Philosophers in Eastern and Central Europe in the Early Twentieth Century

During the first half of the twentieth century, a series of Jewish thinkers from Eastern and Central Europe challenged the authority of reason as the exclusive key to understanding human beings and the world. Several historical and philosophical developments led them to search for new forms of consciousness. This research project will examine the exchange of ideas between Jewish philosophy and rabbinical theology on this subject through the eyes of four thinkers: Samuel Hugo Bergman, Eliezer Yitzhak Sheinbaum, Shmuel Alexandrov, and Shem-Tov Geffen. In his own way, each of these thinkers tried to problematise reason as the prime avenue of knowledge, offered alternative ways of broadening human consciousness, and shared his ideas with some of the other members of this group.

Very little research has been undertaken on most of these thinkers. Bergman’s thought has been examined in comprehensive studies, but its influences from Eastern European rabbinical thought have not been fully described. This is a groundbreaking research project, and although it deviates from the usual chronological framework adopted by the Maimonides Centre, it offers important modern perspectives on the issues of faith, reason, doubt, and the reliability of different sources of knowledge.

Isaac Slater completed a PhD in Jewish thought at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva in 2019. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa in 2019–2020.

Senior Fellow: October–November 2020 and April–June 2021

Research Project: Between Doubt and Certainty: Reason vs. Revelation in the Thirteenth Century

This project aims to examine the debate on the relationship between reason and revelation during the thirteenth century, when, during the so-called “Maimonidean controversy,” opinions were divided as to the necessity and reliability of philosophical knowledge and the limits of human reason. It will examine a number of contemporary Hebrew texts focusing on terms related to this problématique, such as truth, doubt, certainty, reason, belief, knowledge, opinion, wisdom, proof, argument, study, ignorance, and so on. It intends to draw up an inventory of epistemological terminology, the purpose of which is to bring into focus the conceptual framework within which the various parties in the controversy defended their positions and/or attacked others. How did advocates and opponents of rational inquiry into faith (and those who held an intermediate position) substantiate their respective claims, and what were their strategies for convincing their adversaries? Were the arguments of those who opposed rationalism inspired by religious constraints, or do they testify to an attitude that can be described as an a priori scepticism towards the authority of reason in general? How does a sustained critique of philosophical views relate to philosophical scepsis?

Resianne Smidt van Gelder-Fontaine is a senior lecturer in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the Universiteit van Amsterdam.

Junior Fellow: October 2020–September 2021

Research Project: The Role of Testimony in Knowledge Ascriptions: A Defence of Scepticism

The general aim of this research project is to develop a proposed sceptical account of knowledge by investigating both historical and contemporary philosophical texts. More precisely, it will scrutinise a principle proposed in the author’s PhD thesis (part of an error theory for explaining away anti-sceptical intuitions) known as the “Reflexivity of Knowledge Ascription principle” (RKA). According to the RKA, “if A believes that S knows that p, then A believes that A knows that p.” The plan for investigating the RKA is twofold. On the one hand, the project will explore early modern, modern, and contemporary accounts of testimonies that may shed some light on a more fundamental testimonial principle that supports RKA. On the other, it will examine early modern, modern and contemporary philosophical texts that discuss illustrations of RKA (such as revelation, prophecy, or the authority of tradition) in order to establish that RKA is indeed the case and to evaluate it from a sceptical perspective. Indeed, if a connection between RKA and a more fundamental testimonial principle is established, then the reliability of the cases illustrating RKA can be interrogated by attacking the more fundamental testimonial principle. The sceptical circle would then be closed.

Sergiu Spatan is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Universität Hamburg.

Senior Fellow: January–May 2021

Research Project: Spinoza’s “Sceptical Ethics” in Twentieth-Century Italian Philosophy

This project aims to investigate the premises which led some twentieth-century Italian thinkers to interpret Spinoza’s moral philosophy as “sceptical ethics.” In this respect, it will argue that a comparison between this interpretation of a “sceptical Spinoza” and the original rationality of his philosophical system may be an interesting key to a deeper comprehension of the core of Spinoza’s ethics. In addition, this comparison will provide an original viewpoint on the specific role played by emotions in shaping the foundations of Spinoza’s morality, in both its rational and its sceptical interpretation.
This research project will benefit from the rich and unexplored collection of writings on the value of scepsis within Spinoza’s moral philosophy that were drafted by lesser-known Italian philosophers, such as Giuseppe Rensi (1871–1941), Adriano Tilgher (1887–1941), and Ernesto Buonaiuti (1881–1946). These authors are mostly remembered for their opposition to Mussolini’s dictatorship, which led them to sign the Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, but their unusual interpretation of Spinoza as a sceptical and unethical thinker is less well-known.

Michela Torbidoni studied philosophy at Sapienza Università di Roma, where she earned her PhD in practical philosophy with a thesis on Spinoza’s pantheism as mysticism within twentieth-century Italian neo-idealism. She was a fellow at the Institute for Jewish Philosophy and Religion in Hamburg in 2017–2019. 

Senior Fellow: October–November 2021

Research Project: God’s “Word” and the “Call” of Conscience: Reliable Sources of Knowledge?

This project problematises the reliability of two alleged sources of knowledge: (1) God’s “word” and (2) the “call” of conscience. The person addressed by God’s “word” or the “call” of conscience is required to listen to the message imparted and, if this message is not clear, to clarify its meaning. This involves acts of interpretation and critical evaluation. How can we understand God’s “word” in a given situation if His “voice” is inaudible, and how can we know whether prayers are “answered”? These questions are aggravated in a post-Holocaust situation characterised by God’s perceived “silence.” The first part of the project explores the aforementioned issues by focusing on the thought of Martin Buber, Emil L. Fackenheim, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Elazar Benyoëtz, and Melissa Raphael. Part two will investigate the ambiguity of conscience as a medium of self-disclosure and a source of self-deception, with a special focus on Primo Levi’s descriptions of the manipulations of memory performed by the perpetrators and victims of atrocity and on Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the Eichmann trial and her late essays Responsibility and Judgment.

Claudia Welz is a professor of ethics and philosophy of religion at Aarhus Universitet.