Assel, Heinrich

Senior Fellow: April–July 2022

Research Project: Via Negativa: Linguistic Scepticism and Philosophy of Creation in Hermann Cohen, Jakob Gordin, and Emmanuel Levinas (1908–1935)

Emmanuel Levinas is sceptical of theological assertation and logic of judgment, and his ethics makes a claim to radical linguistic scepticism. Levinas’s late, post-1960 ethical linguistic scepticism has been thoroughly researched as a genuinely Jewish-philosophical via negativa (Westerkamp, 2006, 2017). This research, however, does not cover prior developments and premises. Therefore, Levinas’s scepticism will be reviewed within the wider discussion of via negativa in the Jewish philosophy of religion in the first half of the twentieth century, introduced via Hermann Cohen’s Charakteristik der Ethik Maimunis (1908). This initial review of via negativa will focus on Cohen and Jakob Gordin in the period from 1908 to 1935. Therefore, the project will analyse Cohen’s Logic (1902, 1914) and creation theory (1918) along with Gordin’s Untersuchungen zur Theorie des unendlichen Urteils (1929), while also addressing Gordin’s (thus far unresearched) works on Maimonides (1934—) from the former’s Paris estate. The unknown premises of Levinas’s scepticism will also be illustrated. This study will draw from ten of the author’s prior works on Cohen, Rosenzweig, Gordin, and Levinas, and the results will be published in the Maimonides Review in order to further develop an extension of preliminary publications in the 2017 issue of the Yearbook of the Maimonides Centre.

Heinrich Assel is Professor and Chair of Systematic Theology at Universität Greifswald, Germany.