Alef, Mem, Tau

Alef, Mem, Tau

Author: Elliot R. Wolfson

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2006-04-05

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 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."


Venturing Beyond - Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism

Venturing Beyond - Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism

Author: Elliot R. Wolfson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006-05-25

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0199277796

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"Venturing Beyond - Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism is an investigation of the relationship of the mystical and moral viewed through the prism of the kabbalistic tradition. Elliot R. Wolfson's analysis focuses in particular on the multi-layered corpus of Zohar, the major sourcebook of theosophic symbolism that has informed the variegated evolution of kabbalastic thought and practice."--BOOK JACKET.


A New Physiognomy of Jewish Thinking

A New Physiognomy of Jewish Thinking

Author: Aubrey L. Glazer

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2011-03-24

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 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).


Language, Eros, Being

Language, Eros, Being

Author: Elliot R. Wolfson

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2009-08-25

Total Pages: 1256

ISBN-13: 0823224201

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This long-awaited, magisterial study-an unparalleled blend of philosophy, poetry, and philology-draws on theories of sexuality, phenomenology, comparative religion, philological writings on Kabbalah, Russian formalism, Wittgenstein, Rosenzweig, William Blake, and the very physics of the time-space continuum to establish what will surely be a highwater mark in work on Kabbalah. Not only a study of texts, Language, Eros, Being is perhaps the fullest confrontation of the body in Jewish studies, if not in religious studies as a whole. Elliot R. Wolfson explores the complex gender symbolism that permeates Kabbalistic literature. Focusing on the nexus of asceticism and eroticism, he seeks to define the role of symbolic and poetically charged language in the erotically configured visionary imagination of the medieval Kabbalists. He demonstrates that the traditional Kabbalistic view of gender was a monolithic and androcentric one, in which the feminine was conceived as being derived from the masculine. He does not shrink from the negative implications of this doctrine, but seeks to make an honest acknowledgment of it as the first step toward the redemption of an ancient wisdom. Comparisons with other mystical traditions-including those in Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam-are a remarkable feature throughout the book. They will make it important well beyond Jewish studies, indeed, a must for historians of comparative religion, in particular of comparative mysticism. Praise for Elliot R. Wolfson: "Through a Speculum That Shines is an important and provocative contribution to the study of Jewish mysticism by one of the major scholars now working in this field."-Speculum


Luminal Darkness

Luminal Darkness

Author: Elliot R. Wolfson

Publisher: ONEWorld Publications

Published: 2007-01-25

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13:

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Renowned as one of the world’s most astute interpreters of Kabbalistic texts, Elliot Wolfson offers an illuminating and original presentation of Kabbalah. Combining its wisdom with Western philosophical heritage from Plato to Heidegger and beyond, synergy guides his elucidation of the fundamentals of Jewish mysticism and shapes his taxonomy of Kabbalistic thought. A deeply dialectical thinker, Wolfson holds seemingly paradoxical tenets in tandem: Medieval Judaism and American modernity; the ‘tradition’ of Kabbalah and postmodern philosophy; sexual body and human spirit; ontological truth and religious imagination; revelation and occultation; good and evil; left and right – none of these, he writes, are diametrically opposite. Rather, they are dialectical poles with which to think and through which to intuit, tools to gaining a deeper understanding of the Jewish mystical tradition and its meaning for the twenty-first century. An insightful collection of seminal essays written between 1986 and 1998, Luminal Darkness reveals the unmistakably poetic nature of this important scholar’s creative process, and delineates the evolution of his thinking on the role and importance of the Zohar in Kabbalistic tradition. Author Elliot R. Wolfson is the Judge Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew Studies at New York University. He is currently the Editor of the Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy and the author of several award-winning books on Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah.


On Wings of Moonlight

On Wings of Moonlight

Author: Barbara Ellen Galli

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2007-03-07

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 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.


Suffering Time: Philosophical, Kabbalistic, and Ḥasidic Reflections on Temporality

Suffering Time: Philosophical, Kabbalistic, and Ḥasidic Reflections on Temporality

Author: Elliot R. Wolfson

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-05-25

Total Pages: 799

ISBN-13: 9004449345

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No one theory of time is pursued in the essays of this volume, but a major theme that threads them together is Wolfson’s signature idea of the timeswerve as a linear circularity or a circular linearity, expressions that are meant to avoid the conventional split between the two temporal modalities of the line and the circle.


The World Unclaimed

The World Unclaimed

Author: Lilian Alweiss

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 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).


Music and the Ineffable

Music and the Ineffable

Author: Vladimir Jankélévitch

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2024-05-14

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 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.


Eternity Now

Eternity Now

Author: Wojciech Tworek

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2019-08-01

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1438475551

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Demonstrates that Rabbi Shneur Zalman’s teachings regarding time and history enabled Habad’s growth into a mass Jewish movement. The Habad movement, formed in eighteenth-century Belarus, has developed into one of the most influential streams of Hasidic Judaism. Drawing on both mystical sermons and legal writings of its founder, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady (1745–1812), Eternity Now provides the first account of the historiosophical dimensions of early Habad doctrine. Challenging the commonly held view that Shneur Zalman was primarily concerned with supratemporal transcendence, Wojciech Tworek reveals the importance of time and history in his teachings. Tworek argues that the worldly dimensions of Shneur Zalman’s thought were largely responsible for the rapid growth of Habad at the turn of the nineteenth century and fostered its transformation from an elitist circle into a mass movement. Tworek’s readings of Hebrew and Yiddish sources demonstrate the implications of these ideas not only for male scholars but also for non-scholars, Jewish women, and even non-Jews. Philosophical and kabbalistic thought joined together to form a model of religious experience attractive to a broad audience, laying an ideological foundation for the missionary messianism that was to become a hallmark of Habad in the twentieth century. “The description of Shneur Zalman’s teachings as a ‘dynamic and often inharmonious body that changes and adjusts according to temporal circumstances’ is a thoughtful way of approaching the textual mire of Hasidic sources. Tworek draws upon various corpora without attempting to systematize the teachings into a coherent theological system, revealing their vitality through his analysis of this critical theme.” — Ariel Evan Mayse, editor of From the Depth of the Well: An Anthology of Jewish Mysticism