Alef, Mem, Tau

Alef, Mem, Tau
Author: Elliot R. Wolfson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2006-04-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0520246195

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Alef, Mem, Tau also discusses Islamic mysticism and Buddhist thought in relation to the Jewish esoteric tradition as it opens the possibility of a temporal triumph of temporality and the conquering of time through time."

A New Physiognomy of Jewish Thinking

A New Physiognomy of Jewish Thinking
Author: Aubrey L. Glazer
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2011-03-24
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0826438970

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A New Physiognomy of Jewish Thinking is a search for authenticity that combines critical thinking with a yearning for heartfelt poetics. A physiognomy of thinking addresses the figure of a life lived where theory and praxis are unified. This study explores how the critical essays on music of German-Jewish thinker, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969) necessarily accompany the downfall of metaphysics. By scrutinizing a critical juncture in modern intellectual history, marked in 1931 by Adorno's founding of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, neglected applications of Critical Theory to Jewish Thought become possible. This study proffers a constructive justification of a critical standpoint, reconstructively shown how such ideals are seen under the genealogical proviso of re/cognizing their original meaning. Re/cognition of A New Physiognomy of Jewish Thinking redresses neglected applications of Negative Dialectics, the poetics of God, the metaphysics of musical thinking, reification in Zionism, the transpoetics of Physics and Metaphysics, as well as correlating Aesthetic Theory to Jewish Law (halakhah).

Jews in the Notarial Culture

Jews in the Notarial Culture
Author: Robert Ignatius Burns
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 1996-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520203938

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"Fascinating and illuminating, informed by outstanding scholarly analysis. . . . With his deft touch, Burns opens a most unusual window on the realities of medieval Iberian Jewish life."--Robert Chazan, author of European Jewry and the First Crusade

Tradition in a Rootless World

Tradition in a Rootless World
Author: Lynn Davidman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 1991
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0520075455

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"[Davidman's] rich ethnographic observations and lucid prose illuminate two of the more important aspects of modern religion generally: the changing role of women and the resurgence of traditional faith."—Robert Wuthnow, author of Meaning and Moral Order

A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream

A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream
Author: Elliot R. Wolfson
Publisher: Zone Books (Mit Press)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9781935408147

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An exploration of the wakeful character of the dream and the dreamful character of wakefulness. Dreams have attracted the curiosity of humankind for millennia. In A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream, Elliot Wolfson guides the reader through contemporary philosophical and scientific models to the archaic wisdom that the dream state and waking reality are on an equal phenomenal footing--that the phenomenal world is the dream from which one must awaken by waking to the dream that one is merely dreaming that one is awake. By interpreting the dream within the dream, one ascertains the wakeful character of the dream and the dreamful character of wakefulness. Assuming that the manner in which the act of dreaming is interpreted may illuminate the way the interpreter comprehends human nature more generally, Wolfson draws on psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and neuroscience to elucidate the phenomenon of dreaming in a vast array of biblical, rabbinic, philosophical, and kabbalistic texts. To understand the dream, Wolfson writes, it is necessary to embrace the paradox of the fictional truth--a truth whose authenticity can be gauged only from the standpoint of its artificiality. The dream, on this score, may be considered the semblance of the simulacrum, wherein truth is not opposed to deception because the appearance of truthfulness cannot be determined independently of the truthfulness of appearance.

Music and the Ineffable

Music and the Ineffable
Author: Vladimir Jankélévitch
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2024-05-14
Genre: Music
ISBN: 069126838X

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The classic work on the philosophy of music—now available in English to a new generation of readers Vladimir Jankélévitch left behind a remarkable body of work steeped as much in philosophy as in music. His writings on moral quandaries reflect a lifelong devotion to music and performance, and, as a counterpoint, he wrote on music aesthetics and on modernist composers such as Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel. Music and the Ineffable brings together these two threads, the philosophical and the musical, as an extraordinary quintessence of his thought. Jankélévitch deals with classical issues in the philosophy of music, including metaphysics and ontology. These are a point of departure for a sustained examination and dismantling of the idea of musical hermeneutics in its conventional sense. Music, Jankélévitch argues, is not a hieroglyph, not a language or sign system; nor does it express emotions, depict landscapes or cultures, or narrate. On the other hand, music cannot be imprisoned within the icy, morbid notion of pure structure or autonomous discourse. Yet if musical works are not a cipher awaiting the decoder, music is nonetheless entwined with human experience, and with the physical, material reality of music in performance. Music is "ineffable," as Jankélévitch puts it, because it cannot be pinned down, and has a capacity to engender limitless resonance in several domains. Jankélévitch's singular work on music was central to such figures as Roland Barthes and Catherine Clément, and the complex textures and rhythms of his lyrical prose sound a unique note, until recently seldom heard outside the francophone world.

Open Secret

Open Secret
Author: Elliot R. Wolfson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2012
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0231146310

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Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994) was the seventh and seemingly last Rebbe of the Habad-Lubavitch dynasty. Marked by conflicting tendencies, Schneerson was a radical messianic visionary who promoted a conservative political agenda, a reclusive contemplative who built a hasidic sect into an international movement, and a man dedicated to the exposition of mysteries who nevertheless harbored many secrets. Schneerson astutely masked views that might be deemed heterodox by the canons of orthodoxy while engineering a fundamentalist ideology that could subvert traditional gender hierarchy, the halakhic distinction between permissible and forbidden, and the social-anthropological division between Jew and Gentile. While most literature on the Rebbe focuses on whether or not he identified with the role of Messiah, Elliot R. Wolfson, a leading scholar of Jewish mysticism and the phenomenology of religious experience, concentrates instead on Schneerson's apocalyptic sensibility and his promotion of a mystical consciousness that undermines all discrimination. For Schneerson, the ploy of secrecy is crucial to the dissemination of the messianic secret. To be enlightened messianically is to be delivered from all conceptual limitations, even the very notion of becoming emancipated from limitation. The ultimate liberation, or true and complete redemption, fuses the believer into an infinite essence beyond all duality, even the duality of being emancipated and not emancipated--an emancipation, in other words, that emancipates one from the bind of emancipation. At its deepest level, Schneerson's eschatological orientation discerned that a spiritual master, if he be true, must dispose of the mask of mastery. Situating Habad's thought within the evolution of kabbalistic mysticism, the history of Western philosophy, and Mahayana Buddhism, Wolfson articulates Schneerson's rich theology and profound philosophy, concentrating on the nature of apophatic embodiment, semiotic materiality, hypernomian transvaluation, nondifferentiated alterity, and atemporal temporality.

On Wings of Moonlight

On Wings of Moonlight
Author: Barbara Ellen Galli
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2007-03-07
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0773576614

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On Wings of Moonlight - a phrase taken from one of the poems - illuminates the poetic and philosophic kinship between Wolfson, Franz Rosenzweig, one of his influences since graduate school, and Paul Celan. Displaying a deep knowledge of the literary, philosophical, Jewish, and feminist traditions informing Wolfson's academic work, Galli argues that his prose cannot be fully appreciated without consideration of its poetic dimensions.

The World Unclaimed

The World Unclaimed
Author: Lilian Alweiss
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2003
Genre: Philosophy, German
ISBN: 082141464X

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Annotation In, Martin Heidegger set out an anti-Cartesian attack on Husserl that argued Cartesian philosophy falsely separates the subject from the world. In turn, Alweiss (philosophy, Trinity College, Ireland) contends that Heidegger failed in his attempt to, in her words, "reclaim the world." She defends Husserl's work, detailing the epistemological debate between the two philosophers, and thereby examining a central concern of modern analytic philosophy as it played out in the very different tradition of Continental thinking. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Saintly Influence

Saintly Influence
Author: Edith Wyschogrod
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2009
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0823230872

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Since the publication of her first book, the first about Levinas published in English, Edith Wyschogrod has been at the forefront of continental philosophy and philosophy of religion.In this volume, twelve scholars examine and display the influence of Wyschogrod's work in essays that take up the thematics of influence in a variety of contexts: Christian theology, the saintly behavior of the villagers of Le Chambon sur Lignon, the texts of the medieval Jewish mystic Abraham Abulafia, the philosophies of Levinas, Derrida, and Benjamin, the practice of intellectual history, the cultural memory of the New Testament, and pedagogy.