Published here in English for the first time, these essays offer a glimpse into the cultural and social dimensions of Franz Rosenzweig's thought-an aspect of his philosophy that has too often been ignored by an overemphasis on his status as a religious thinker. The editor provides a broader context for Rosenzweig's concepts, especially his orientation in the modern world and concerns regarding modernity and technological developments.
This volume brings together Rosenzweig's central essays on theology and philosophy, including two works available for the first time in English: the conclusion to Rosenzweig's book Hegel and the State, and Rosenzweig's famous letter to Rudolph Ehrenberg known as the Urzelle of the Star of Redemption, an essential work for understanding Rosenzweig, Weimar theology and philosophy, and German idealism and the existential reaction of the period. Additional selections are presented in new or revised translations. Introduction and notes by Franks and Morgan set Rosenzweig's works in context and illuminate his role as one of the key thinkers of the period.
Although Franz Rosenzweig is arguably the most important Jewish philosopher of the twentieth century, his thought remains little understood. Here, Leora Batnitzky argues that Rosenzweig's redirection of German-Jewish ethical monotheism anticipates and challenges contemporary trends in religious studies, ethics, philosophy, anthropology, theology, and biblical studies. This text, which captures the hermeneutical movement of Rosenzweig's corpus, is the first to consider the full import of the cultural criticism articulated in his writings on the modern meanings of art, language, ethics, and national identity. In the process, the book solves significant conundrums about Rosenzweig's relation to German idealism, to other major Jewish thinkers, to Jewish political life, and to Christianity, and brings Rosenzweig into conversation with key contemporary thinkers. Drawing on Rosenzweig's view that Judaism's ban on idolatry is the crucial intellectual and spiritual resource available to respond to the social implications of human finitude, Batnitzky interrogates idolatry as a modern possibility. Her analysis speaks not only to the question of Judaism's relationship to modernity (and vice versa), but also to the generic question of the present's relationship to the past--a subject of great importance to anyone contemplating the modern statuses of religious tradition, reason, science, and historical inquiry. By way of Rosenzweig, Batnitzky argues that contemporary philosophers and ethicists must relearn their approaches to religious traditions and texts to address today's central ethical problems.
The Star of Redemption is widely recognized as a key document of modern existential thought and a significant contribution to Jewish theology in the twentieth century. An affirmation of what Rosenzweig called “the new thinking,” the work ensconces common sense in the place of abstract, conceptual philosophizing and posits the validity of the concrete, individual human being over that of “humanity” in general. Fusing philosophy and theology, it assigns both Judaism and Christianity distinct but equally important roles in the spiritual structure of the world, and finds in both biblical religions approaches toward a comprehension of reality.
The volume collects a series of groundbreaking new studies which delve into the work of Franz Rosenzweig and assess its enduring yet still unacknowledged value for Epistemology, Aesthetics, Moral and Political Philosophy, going far beyond Theology and Philosophy of Religion.
Alter explores the ways in which a range of iconoclastic 20th century authors have put to use the stories, language, and imagery found in the Hebrew Bible. Includes attention on Franz Kafka's "Amerika" and James Joyce's "Ulysses".
Pollock argues that Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption is devoted to the philosophical task of grasping 'the All' - the whole of what is - as a system.
A representative survey of the contemporary Rosenzweig research, gathering the state of affairs of the main spearheads of the research and it highlights the incentives for the programs to come.
Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig questioned the whole of Western philosophical tradition and tried to found a "new thinking" based on the Jewish-Christian concept of Revelation. System and Revelation, the first contemporary, comprehensive analysis of Rosenzweig's thinking, describes his philosophy as it is presented in his major work, The Star of Redemption, and highlights its relevance to postmodern thinking. The Star of Redemption, first published in 1921, has as its background World War I and the bloody collapse of traditional Europe and its values. In it, Rosenzweig attempted to elaborate a vast theoretical construction that was based upon the most specific categories of Judaism but tended nonetheless to universal signification. One of the central assertions of the book was that the history of the West, a history that is itself the last avatar of universal history, unavoidably rests upon violence and war. The first part of The Star of Redemption features a critique of Western rationality, which Moses analyzes with forcefulness and clarity. In the chapters devoted to the second part of The Star, Moses describes the coming into relation of the elements (God, Man, World) isolated by the breakup of the Hegelian totality. The third part of The Star describes Judaism and Christianity in their sociological reality--mainly through the analysis of their sacred time. Finally, the last chapter addresses the one Truth that transcends both Judaism and Christianity. Emphasizing the conceptual structures of Rosenzweig's philosophy, its references to cultural and historical data, as well as the implicit tensions that undermine the systematical coherence of this thinking, Moses underlines some of the most fundamental speculative gestures in Rosenzweig's thought. System and Revelation is neither Rosenzweig's spiritual biography nor a study of the whole of his work; rather it is a look at Rosenzweig's place within the history of contemporary philosophy through an analysis that is part exposition, part commentary, and part interpretation.
Two German philosophers working during the Weimar Republic in Germany, between the two World Wars, produced seminal texts that continue to resonate almost a hundred years later. Franz Rosenzweig-a Jewish philosopher, and Martin Heidegger-a philosopher who at one time was studying to become a Catholic priest, each in their own, particular way include in their writings powerful philosophies of art that, if approached phenomenologically and ethically, provide keys to understanding their radically divergent trajectories, both biographically and for their philosophical heritage. Simon provides a close reading of some of their essential texts-The Star of Redemption for Rosenzweig and Being and Time and The Origin of the Work of Art for Heidegger-in order to draw attention to how their philosophies of art can be understood to provide significant ethical directives.
