Fellows and Research Projects: 2022–23

Senior Fellow: April–August 2023

Research Project: Sceptical about Jesus: The Emergence of German-Jewish Literature in the Renegotiation of a Founding Figure of Christianity

This project focuses on German literary texts from the Enlightenment to the present day that appropriate the Christian figure of Jesus and related motifs, symbols, and narratives, thereby exploring the limits of universalist promises and asserting Jewish voices and spaces in a literary field predominated by a Christian majority society. Especially by reviewing anti-Semitic notions of Jewish guilt as well as the Christian concept of vicarious sacrifice, exclusion and violence are rewritten into a shared history which is shown to be characterised by heterogeneity and ongoing dispute. The central hypothesis is that in view of the abundance of figurations of Jesus in German-Jewish literature (which has not yet been comprehensively researched), the sceptical adaptation and analysis of this complex can be seen as a constitutive site of what can be called German-Jewish literature as such. Following up on prior research (on Kompert, Franzos, Perutz, Lasker-Schüler, Stefan Zweig, and Doron Rabinovici), this project will concentrate on Enlightenment constellations, ghetto literature, and selected texts by Franz Werfel and Alfred Döblin as well as poems by Nelly Sachs, Karl Wolfskehl, and Paul Celan that allude to Christian symbols in their reflection of the Shoah and will ask whether scepticism about Jesus not only constitutes a tradition, but also marks its collapse.

Doerte Bischoff is a professor of German studies at Universität Hamburg.

Senior Fellow: July–August 2023

Research Project: Talmudic Scepticism

Daniel Boyarin will work on two projects during his fellowship. The first will deal with the Babylonian Talmud as a sceptical work, including discussions of the virtual refusal to provide or even endorse solutions to outstanding problems in Jewish law or thought within that work. This aspect of the Talmud will be considered in the light of texts such as the Dissoi Logoi and Sophist thought more generally. Another aspect of this project will focus on the Menippean satire in the Talmud as bearing an inner critique of the foundations of the rabbinic search for the good, the true, and even the beautiful.
The second project will deal with the Midrash as sceptical hermeneutics. Christian writers from Paul to Origen and beyond characterise the rabbinic enterprises of biblical interpretation as refusing true interpretation by eschewing the Son (who alone knows the Father) and/or the Logos as the guide to that Truth. This project seeks to take up this theme, taking it seriously as a good reading of the rabbis and describing midrash as a hermeneutics of the opacity of the text and thus leading necessarily (as Origen already saw) to a sceptical hermeneutics of the uninterpretable text. Rabbinic alternatives to interpretation will also be discussed, such as the use of narratives to go alongside other narratives (the mashal).

Daniel Boyarin is Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor (emeritus) of Talmudic Culture at the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley, USA.

Junior Fellow: October 2022–September 2023

Research Project: Between Apocalypticism and Scepticism: Rethinking Theodicy with Jacob Taubes

Can theodicy, after the Holocaust, be understood as containing a sceptical dimension within itself that points at once to its own limits and to the limits of scepticism? This project, which is located at the intersection of religious studies, political theology, and the history of modern European philosophy, aims to explore the above question and has the following research premises and goals. Firstly, it proceeds from the hypothesis that the Jewish apocalyptic thinker Jacob Taubes offers what may be called a “negative” approach to the concept and meaning of theodicy out of the post-Holocaust context—an approach that prioritises questions over answers and hesitation and darkness over certainty and light. Secondly, it seeks to constructively develop this “negative” notion of theodicy and to critically assess its relationship to scepticism and to Taubes’s own apocalypticism. Finally, based on Taubes’s references to “the dark ground” of creation and the book of Job, and also on his polemic against Hans Blumenberg, it seeks to retrace an intellectual trajectory of the sceptical and apocalyptic dimensions of theodicy, especially in the period from the Enlightenment to the late twentieth century.

Kirill Chepurin is a postdoctoral researcher. He wrote his PhD thesis in theology at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. 

Senior Fellow: June–August 2023 (DEFERRED/2019–20)

Research Project: Spinoza and the Parmenidean Ascent: Themes from Wittgenstein and Sextus Empiricus

During my time at the Maimonides Centre, I will build on the rationalist, Parmenidean, and sceptical research programme launched by my book The Parmenidean Ascent, which will be published in summer 2020. The monism in that book—in the form of a rejection of all distinctions—has sceptical implications, not just in the sense that it leads to a doubt or denial of distinctions to which we are ordinarily committed, but also in the sense that it challenges whether we even have—as we uncritically presuppose that we do—a coherent understanding of such notions as being, action, knowledge, and meaning.  During my time at the centre, I would like to deepen this sceptical strand in my project by examining the rationalist underpinnings of the scepticism of Sextus Empiricus and the extent to which this kind of scepticism, infused by the Principle of Sufficient Reason, can be found in Spinoza. This distinctionless, sceptical monism that I will explore in Spinoza reflects a major change from the interpretation of Spinoza that I offered in my 2008 book in the Routledge series in the history of philosophy, and indeed a related project on which I will be working at the Centre is the completion of the substantially different second edition of my book, Spinoza.

Michael Della Rocca is Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University.

Senior Fellow: May–June 2023

Research Project: Divine Providence during the Holocaust: The Religious (Re)Turn from Theodicy to Scepticism

Many who struggled with the philosophical/theological crisis posed by the enormity of the suffering during the Shoah resorted to theodicies that drew on traditional rabbinic models that were formulated in one way or another to preserve God’s justice and goodness at the cost of implicating human beings in their own misfortune. None more profoundly engaged this dilemma both existentially and theologically than the Hasidic master R. Kalonymous Kalman Shapira (1889–1943). His sermons, which were delivered in the Warsaw ghetto, are a wholly unique testament to a sustained theological, philosophical, and existential struggle to wrest meaning out of evil that defied reason and undermined faith. The suffering of the Shoah presents not only a factual and empirical novum for Shapira, but also one that is rabbinically unparalleled. What this project will show is that uniquely and haltingly throughout his sermons, R. Shapira returns to a sceptical theology rooted in the book of Job, an entire biblical work that explicitly rejected theodicies that “did not speak the truth about Me as my servant Job did” (Job 42:7) in favour of a scepticism that paradoxically reflects supreme faith and allows for a revelatory transcendent Thou. It will place R. Shapira’s rabbinic confrontation in dialogue with the profound philosophical responses of Emil Fackenheim and Hans Jonas whose comceptions of faith after the Shoah are rooted ultimately in a sceptically induced shattering of theodicy.

James Diamond is the endowed chair of Jewish studies at the University of Waterloo.

Junior Fellow: October 2022–March 2023

Research Project: Scepticism Turned into Antisemitism: Protestant Orientalist Scholarship and the Rise of Modern Antisemitism

This project examines the role that Protestant Orientalist scholarship played in the development of modern antisemitism, not despite but precisely because of Protestantism’s alignment with sceptical academic investigation. The same dynamics that led to the development of the historical-critical method, which would eventually undermine the very foundation upon which Protestantism rests – namely, Scripture – also tragically influenced the Protestant stance towards the traditional literature of Judaism. When Protestant scholars and theologians discovered that many of the Jewish texts that they had avidly studied were not as ancient as claimed, they went from appropriating these texts to devaluing them and finally rejected them altogether, often coupling their rejection not only with traditional anti-Jewish bias, but increasingly also with modern antisemitism.

Níels Páll Eggerz is a research associate at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt.

Junior Fellow: October 2023–September 2024

Research Project: Sceptical Foundations in Walter Benjamin’s Reflections on Experience, Language, and Literature 

The main hypothesis of this study is that scepticism—the impossibility of knowledge—lies at the core of Walter Benjamin’s reflections on experience, language, and literature, starting from his early writings in 1913 to 1916. This impossibility does not represent a dead end. On the contrary, it is the critical precondition for a developing theory that sees constant change and the obliqueness of concepts and aesthetic forms—such as translation, allegory, and literary montage—as the only way to remain truthful to reality, both theoretically and politically.
This project’s second hypothesis is that this dialectic finds its structure thanks to the intensive exchange between Benjamin and the Jewish cultural milieu that began in 1913, and especially that with Gershom Scholem regarding Jewish mysticism from 1915 on. Its philosophical consequences, however, extended up to the 1930s and can be recognised in several works, such as Crisis of the Novel, Berliner Kindheit, The Storyteller, and even in the methodology chosen for the Arcades Project.

Caterina Diotto is a postdoctoral researcher. She has a PhD in philosophy from the Università degli Studi di Verona.

Senior Fellow: June–August 2023 (DEFERRED/2019–20)

Research Project: The Rabbis as Jesters and the Truth Wars of Antiquity  

This research employs Leszek Kolakowski’s figure of the jester to argue that the dominant voice in classical talmudic literature (from the second to the seventh centuries CE) expresses an aversion to dogmatic truth claims of various kinds. It documents rabbinic opposition to a range of dogmatic epistemological positions: the positive absolutism of truth-centred rationalist philosophy, ontological realism, and empiricism, as well as the negative absolutism of relativism and nihilism. Christine Hayes argues that against these absolutisms and their associated claims to epistemological certainty, the rabbis deploy the destabilising strategies of play, including not only humour, but also, and specifically, excess. She further argues that the jester’s voice is not confined to non-legal texts; every developed legal argument of the Talmud is an exercise in (serious) play designed precisely to prevent dogmatic certainty in the realm of halakhah, for the rabbinic “jester” stood vigilant against the absolutist within as much as the absolutist without. Against the philosophers’ static “one” and the sophists’ equally static but nihilistic “none,” rabbinic scepticism imagined a dynamic world of manifold particulars that allows neither moral and epistemological certainty nor nihilism. Methodologically, my work is deeply informed by recent scholarship on play theory, humour theory, and the epistemological function of detail in both ancient and contemporary theories of knowledge.

Christine Hayes is the Weis Professor of Religious Studies in Classical Judaica at Yale University.

Senior Fellow: October 2023–February 2024 

Research Project: The Epistemic Role of Cognitive Skills in Scholastic Philosophy (1250–1650)

Scepticism about the external world took on a particularly forceful form during the late Scholastic period, where divine omnipotence came to be centred in debates about the mind and reality. While most Scholastics responded to this sceptical worry by limiting divine power (e.g., by appealing to divine goodness), some, instead of attempting to defuse the challenge, accepted it and used it as a way of testing different theories in different domains. If a theory entailed scepticism, then that theory needed to be revised. This project—part of a broader book project on moral and cognitive abilities in Scholastic philosophy (1250–1650)—concerns the following two domains where this strategy of using the sceptical hypothesis to limit our theorising was put to use: the issue of the ontological status of mental acts on the one hand and the issue of the justification of our beliefs on the other. It will argue that a distinctive “skills-first” theory of cognition emerged from this strategy, which rejected infallibilism about justification and embraced a kind of reliabilism about knowledge. On this view, a belief is justified insofar as it is reliably produced by a suitable (acquired) cognitive skill, such as the skill of distinguishing breeds of cattle.

Peter Hartman is an associate professor at Loyola University Chicago, Department of Philosophy.

Senior Fellow: April–August 2023

Research Project: “Faith” and “Doubt” in Kabbalistic, Pietistic, and Hasidic Literature

Individual doubt about one’s faith represents a well-known potential threat to any institutionalised form of religion. Traditionalist authors therefore developed several literary tactics in order to protect their own belief systems from this challenge. Thus, instead of ignoring religious doubt and scepticism altogether, they at times seize upon the opponent’s position and incorporate it into their master narrative as a decidedly negative example. This method may manifest itself on a rather abstract level by means of prosopopoeia, such as identifying the notion of doubt with a personification of evil. In other cases, it may be more concrete, epitomised in the character of a doubting co-religionist, who is at times portrayed as a sinner whose wicked behaviour must be overcome.
This project will deal with some of the elementary coping mechanisms used by Jewish authors with a traditionalist agenda and their strategies aiming to defend and preserve what they consider an integral part of their heritage. It will engage with the question of how traditionalist approaches constitute the very antithesis of what have recently been described as “sceptical strategies.” A thorough analysis of examples from Kabbalistic, Hasidic, and pietistic literature of the (early) modern period will investigate the numerous functions that the image of the sceptic serves in these narratives. On this basis, it will ask what conclusions can be drawn in order to understand the dynamics involved in the formation of new religious trends.

Patrick Koch is a research associate at the Institute for Jewish Philosophy and Religion at Universität Hamburg.

Senior Fellow: October 2022–February 2023

Research Project: Meta-Philosophical Scepticism

Meta-philosophical scepticism is scepticism about the domain of philosophy. According to meta-philosophical scepticism, we cannot have any philosophical knowledge. This form of scepticism has two main sources. The first is doubts about the possibility that cognitive mechanisms underlie philosophical knowledge. Unlike in the case of sense-perception, say, it seems odd that there could be cognitive mechanisms that put us in touch with the abstract and general truths that philosophers claim to know. The second source is disagreement. For virtually all philosophical positions, there seem to be equally competent people who endorse them. Since these people cannot all be right, it seems that each might well be the one who errs, but this possibility undermines their claims to philosophical knowledge. This project will investigate how recent advances in the study of philosophical methodology can be harnessed in order to refute meta-philosophical scepticism.

Thomas Krödel is a professor of philosophy of science at Universität Hamburg.

Junior Fellow: October 2022–September 2023

Research Project: “Spiritus sanctus non est Scepticus,” or a Reformulation of Dubitatio Perpetua? Doubt and Scepticism in the Thought of Martin Luther and Their Potential as a Basis for Religious Dialogue

When it comes to religious doubt, Martin Luther’s thought offers a dialectical range of approaches. On the one hand, he claims “spiritus sanctus non est Scepticus” (WA 18,605,32). On the other, in his view, doubting human (religious) traditions is in some cases mandatory, and as he notes in another key passage of his work on doubt and certainty (WA 39/II,163,14–164,9), scepticism is also an enduring and necessary experience for the believer. In this sense, one might even suggest that Luther was reformulating the idea of dubitatio perpetua. In this project, the results of the analysis of Luther’s approaches will be compared with statements about dubitatio perpetua and certitudo made by Roman Catholic theologians such as Robert Bellarmin, and also, for example, Unitarians or Socinians such as Joachim Stegmann. The aim is to investigate the concept of doubt as an engine of piety and theology in Luther’s thought, and at the same time to shed light on the dialectical tension of the different statements and to provide examples that show their potential use as a basis for interconfessional dialogue or dialogue beyond confessional limits. This study will also explore how the dialectic relationship between doubt as a limitation of faith and faith as a limitation of doubt can be adequately expressed.

Frank Kurzmann is a research associate in the Department of Protestant Theology at Universität Hamburg.

Senior Fellow: October 2022–February 2023

Research Project: Philology as a Confessional Tool: The Sacred Texts

The focus of this project will be the study of the Masoretic Bible and the biblical Masorah in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although it was never at the centre of formal Jewish education, the study of the Hebrew Bible has always been a part of it. In the Middle Ages, not only Hebrew language and grammar, but also the medieval biblical metatext—the Masorah—were studied and introduced into medieval and early modern Jewish commentaries. In contrast, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Protestant historical-critical research on the Hebrew Bible was mainly grounded in contemporary studies of late antiquity. The Hebrew Bible was regarded as an integral part of ancient Near Eastern literature, while the Masorah, as a medieval metatext, became a neglected field of scholarly research. Abraham Geiger was one of the first scholars after Wolf Heidenheim to take up this issue in his article “Zur Geschichte der Maßorah” (1864/5). His initial research on the Masorah led to a variety of publications and editions regarding the Masoretic material, for example by Adolf Neubauer (“Pèle-mèle literaire. Die Massorah אכלה ואכלה,” 1862) and Salman (Salomo) Frensdorff (Das Buch Ochlah W’ochlah, 1864; Die Massora Magna nach den ältesten Drucken mit Zuziehung alter Handschriften, 1876). However, Jewish Bible research in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not really follow the path of its great spiritus rector, which led to the fact that most of the Masoretic material, especially that belonging to Ashkenazi manuscript traditions, remains unedited to this day and intensive research on it has only recently begun. This project investigates the significance of the confessional barriers for Masoretic research and explores the developments that Israeli Masorah research in particular has made since the middle of the twentieth century.

Hanna Liss is the chair of the Department of Bible and Jewish Exegesis at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg and Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in Germany.

Senior Fellow: April–August 2023

Research Project: On Refuting Pyrrhonian Scepticism

Is it possible to refute Pyrrhonian scepticism? At first blush, the question may sound silly, given the common view among both philosophers and non-philosophers that any kind of radical sceptical stance is patently absurd, untenable, or false. Moreover, the fact that a view yields radical sceptical consequences is all too often taken to be a reductio of that view. This allegedly obvious weakness of extreme forms of scepticism notwithstanding, it seems that a present-day Pyrrhonist (i.e., a neo-Pyrrhonist) could deploy at least three different—and apparently sufficiently strong—defensive strategies against attempts at refutation. The strategies in question appeal (i) to the fact that the suspension of judgment is experienced as a mental state that imposes itself on the Pyrrhonist when he is confronted with conflicting arguments that strike him as equipollent, (ii) to the phenomenon of widespread and entrenched disagreement among non-sceptics, and (iii) to the seemingly aporetic or self-defeating nature of reason. The purpose of the present research project is to explore and assess these three sceptical strategies.

Diego E. Machuca is an associate researcher in philosophy at CONICET, Argentina.

Senior Fellow: April–July 2023

Research Project: Jewish Responses to Sceptical Challenges in the Medieval Hebrew Logical Tradition

Although work in medieval scepticism has generally focused on challenges to the Aristotelian philosophical tradition from without, there are two sceptical challenges to knowledge found in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics that have to do with his conception of knowledge as understanding/explanation. The first challenge argues that because first principles cannot be explained, and since knowledge, according to Aristotle, rests on first principles, we cannot have knowledge (explanation) of anything. The second challenge argues that because knowledge is the explanation of a thing through its cause and the existence of God has no cause through which it is explained, there cannot be knowledge of God’s existence. Medieval philosophers dealt with these challenges in various ways. With regard to the sceptical challenge pertaining to the existence of God, they appealed to a distinction found in the Posterior Analytics between factual and explanatory demonstrations. The fact of God’s existence can be demonstrated, but not explained through a demonstration.
The project involves considering the treatment of these two questions—the antique knowledge and the epistemic value of factual demonstrations—in the writings of Levi Gersonides, Judah Messer Leon, and Abraham Bibago, all of whom wrote commentaries on the Posterior Analytics.

Charles Manekin is a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland.

Senior Fellow: April–July 2022

Research Project: Galician Maskilic Critiques of Hasidism: Sceptical Reverberations?

This project will investigate the degree to which the arguments of the nineteenth-century Galician Jewish maskilim (enlighteners) were influenced by Enlightenment sceptical arguments against the claims of popular religion. The proposed study will focus on the Galician maskil Judah Leib Mieses (1798–1831), whose work The Zeal for Truth (Qinat ha-emet) is an extended and learned polemic against belief in ghosts, demons, and spirits and the general belief in mystical powers that characterises Hasidic thought.
It may seem odd that religious rationalists could have been influenced by sceptics; one might suppose that only fideists would have a use for such sceptical arguments in order to justify their embrace of faith. However, sceptics and religious rationalists shared a common enemy in the religious enthusiast, and that is why religious rationalists found the sceptics’ arguments appealing.
Although the focus of this study will be The Zeal for Truth, other Galician maskilim, such as Isaac Erter and Nachman Krochmal, will also be investigated in order to ascertain the extent to which they employ arguments drawn from Enlightenment scepticism. To be sure, the scepticism of the Galician maskilim is not thoroughgoing; still, the use of sceptical arguments by religious rationalists in a Jewish context has not been studied.

Rachel Manekin is a professor emerita of Jewish studies at the University of Maryland.

 

Senior Fellow: June–August 2023

Research Project: Rejecting Theodicy as an Act of Piety

Twentieth-century Jewish philosophy shows a sceptical tendency when it rejects theodicy. Traditional theodicy, from a sceptical point of view, requires an error theory; it is categorically mistaken in its assumptions, aims, and questions. The thinkers to be explored—Joseph Soloveitchik, Emanuel Levinas, Emil Fackenheim, and Rav Shagar—replace an earlier metaphysical discourse with an ethical one. Moral resistance to evil becomes what can be called “performative theodicy.” Bracketing dubious metaphysical doxastic claims, they attach greater warrant to ethical ones, which must now function as absolutes if evil is to be opposed absolutely. Yet why should ethical claims be more doubt-resistant than metaphysical ones? How far will these modern thinkers allow scepticism to go? This project will explore the reasons for and the extent of scepticism in some modern Jewish discussions of theodicy.

Alan Mittleman is a professor of religious studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

Junior Fellow: October 2022–March 2023

Research Project: The Sceptical Criticism of Dogmatic Theologies in Cicero’s De natura deorum

Is doubting one’s religion an instance of scepticism? Meeting the challenge launched by this question, this project aims to investigate the delicate (and multi-faceted) relationship between scepticism(s) and religion, starting from a survey of Cicero’s De natura deorum. In this crucial dialogue, the theological doctrines pursued by the Epicurean and Stoic schools are systematically questioned and refuted by Cotta, the spokesman of the “sceptical” Academy. This work will focus on the interesting and quite curious “interpenetration” and “interaction” between Academic and Pyrrhonian scepticism that emerges from Cotta’s replies to the Epicurean Velleius and the Stoic Balbus. The project also aims to provide an opportunity to examine and appreciate the benefits of sceptical practices in the religious sphere.

Chiara Rover is a teaching assistant at Sapienza Università di Roma.

Senior Fellow: May–July 2023

Research Project: Autobiographies of Conversion and Apostasy as Narratives of Modern Jewish Scepticism

This project explores the autobiographical writings of Central European Jews who converted to Christianity and Islam in the first half of the twentieth century. It asks how such figures articulated the meaning of their conversion and how they forged their religious identity in relation to their Jewish background. The figures that comprise this study can be designated as radical Jewish sceptics in that their conversion narratives are constructed around the moral criticism and intellectual doubt that they express towards Judaism. This study contributes to scholarship on Jewish scepticism in two ways: firstly, by introducing historical figures who are not traditionally regarded as “Jewish thinkers” into the discussion and thus broadening our understanding of the phenomenon of Jewish scepticism to include thinkers who did not self-identify as Jews, and secondly by exploring the narrative and literary dimensions of religious scepticism in order to trace the ways that different expressions of theological doubt are harnessed to tell the story of a life and give shape to autobiographical narrative.

Abraham Rubin is an assistant professor at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Dayton.

Senior Fellow: mid-January–mid-June 2023

Research Project: Scepticism, the Animal Soul, and Human Perfection in the Early Modern Sephardic World

This research project reveals the multiple reasonings by which thinkers envisioned human uniqueness vis-à-vis other animals between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a period in which previously held biblically inspired beliefs came into question. It intends to examine the question of the border between humans and animals through a specifically Jewish context. The objective is to investigate the debates among Sephardi scholars, mostly in Amsterdam, regarding the animal soul and its perceived ontological difference from the individual soul of human beings. Studying the place of the human-animal boundary in the theology of Sephardic Amsterdam offers us a unique vantage point from which to examine the existential fragility of an ex-converso community at a time when its members were confronting what was perceived to be a threat to the integrity of their religious heritage. Such a project has implications for sceptical debates about the strategies that Jewish thinkers pursued in order to defend God’s providence and scriptural interpretive tradition from critical thoughts; in so doing, the same thinkers demarcated boundaries between faith and doubt in the Jewish oral tradition. This perspective on religious scepticism and its relationship to the boundaries between humans and animals adds an uncharted dimension to the well-documented intellectual disputes that stirred seventeenth-century Jewish Amsterdam, a narrative that has thus far been ignored, despite its continued relevance for contemporary Jewish theology.

Before coming to MCAS, Ran Segev was a Minerva Postdoctoral Fellow at Universität Hamburg.

Senior Fellow: October 2022–February 2023

Research Project: Philosophia Perennis and the Sceptical Challenges of Modernity: A Neo-Thomist Response

The Neo-Thomist (and more generally Neo-Scholastic) movement is characterised by a double dynamic: a negative one and a positive one. Firstly, it is a critique of, and a confrontation with, modern culture and especially with modern philosophy. At the same time, this confrontation pursues a specific positive goal, since it is carried out in order to revive (and update) a fundamental worldview (philosophia perennis/perennial philosophy), which constitutes (at least implicitly) a common core of all major classical philosophical schools and is explicitly and thoroughly articulated by Scholastic philosophy, particularly by St. Thomas Aquinas. Neo-Thomism can therefore be considered as a preservation and reactivation of tradition; not, however, as a mouldy relic, but as a living and powerful force.
The aim of the project is twofold. In the first step, it intends to present this dynamic as a confrontation with the sceptical nature of modern philosophy. In a second step, it intends to analyse the hermeneutical thesis according to which the history of biblical Israel can be considered as a prefiguration of the same “cultural battle.”

Before coming to Hamburg, Roberto Vinco was an acting professor at the Department of Philosophy at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg.