In a previous letter, I described some of the efforts I’ve been involved with over the last ten years to establish the academic legitimacy of the idea that the Hebrew Bible and classical rabbinic sources actually had an influence on the history of Western political thought. (“The Biblical Century,” May 10, 2010). Most people, I suspect, will find the proposition that the Bible had an influence on Western thought pretty uncontroversial. Most academics would probably agree as well. But this isn’t reflected in either the research that universities conduct or in the courses that are taught to students: The fact is that in most universities in America, Europe and Israel, the norm is still to conduct research and teach disciplines such as philosophy, political theory, and intellectual history as though the Hebrew Bible did not make a significant contribution to the ideas of the Western tradition.
There are a number of contributing factors here. But a central one is the fact that the Hebrew Bible is usually not studied for its ideas in the academic setting. If the Hebrew Scriptures have anything to say about metaphysics or theory of knowledge, ethics or political philosophy—until recently at least, the Bible programs didn’t really see it as their job to investigate these questions. Neither did the philosophy programs, since the Bible isn’t supposed to be philosophy. (According to the old categories, the Bible isn’t reason, it’srevelation.) So in the end, it turned out that no one in the universities thought that their discipline was responsible for researching and teaching the Bible’s ideas.
So I was very pleased a couple of weeks ago when the John Templeton Foundation announced a $1.1 million grant to the Shalem Center to conduct a three-year international research program investigating the philosophical content of the Hebrew Bible, Talmud, and Midrash. As far as I know, this grant, which will support a series of annual conferences, workshops for students, and research fellowships, constitutes the first time a major foundation has sought to support research into the philosophical content of the classical Jewish sources. The grant to Shalem is also part of a larger project in “philosophical theology” in which two Christian institutions—the University of Notre Dame and the University of Innsbruck, Austria—will be conducting parallel investigations into the foundations of Christian philosophy. (I’ve attached the Jerusalem Post’s coverage of the story here.)
For those of us involved with this project, it’s really pretty exciting. Don’t laugh (well, okay, go ahead), but it feels a little bit like trying to land a man on the moon. Of course the project could just fail, or end up being an embarrassment. There’s always that risk. But there’s also this sense that it could be the beginning of something spectacular.
Well, so here’s the first bit of embarrassment. I received word yesterday that one of the principal mailing lists announcing conferences and fellowship opportunities to philosophy professors around the world has declined to post the announcement for the first conference, entitled “Philosophical Investigation of the Hebrew Bible, Talmud and Midrash”.
The manager of the list wrote that “We have a list policy against theological/scriptural postings.”
The explanation? “They’re just broader than the list supports.”
It’s actually pretty funny that studying the philosophy of the Hebrew Bible is a project too broad for this particular listserv, considering that in recent months they’ve sent out calls for papers trying to enlist philosophy professors to write on topics such as “Philosophy and Baseball” and “Philosophy and Spiderman”. Here’s an announcement that I received from this same listserv just three days ago:
Topic: Book: Porn: Philosophy for Everyone–How to Think With Kink
Davil324 <davil324@gmail.com> Nov 19 06:59AM -0800 ^
Porn – Philosophy for Everyone:
How to Think With Kink
Dave Monroe, Editor & Fritz Allhoff, Series Editor
From Wiley-Blackwell
Love it or loathe it, pornography is as old as human more…
I don’t want to be interpreted as objecting to this kind of thing. Different universities will support different kinds of research. That’s just part of the open marketplace of ideas, right?
But on the other hand, it’s striking that for certain segments of academia, the philosophy of pornography isn’t too “broad” to be supported. Whereas the philosophy of the Bible—well now that’s risqué!
So if you know any philosophers (or philosophically inclined scholars in other disciplines) who might be interested in participating in a slightly risqué conference on the philosophy of the Hebrew Bible and Talmud, please forward them this link to our Philosophy of the Hebrew Bible Conference Announcement.
Given the prudishness currently prevailing in some parts of the philosophical community, maybe not everyone has had a chance to have a peek at it just yet.
I have read your works with great interest and am delighted to see that Shalem has receuived an award from the John Templeton Foundation to pursue your work on Philosophical Investigation of the Hebrew Bible, Talmud and Midrash”.
We have just finished a three year start-up grant from the Templeton Foundation, and previously the Fulbright Foundation at Tel Aviv University to develop the field of Biblical Psychology. Please look at www.rsmh.org. If you send me your best e-mail address I will send you some books and articles that came out of this work., the essence of which is to reformulate modern psychology on Biblical rather than Greek foundations. I submitted a paper a number of years ago to Assaf Sagiv at Azure, regarding Ten Commandments for a Biblical Psychology. I would be most interested in sharing our work with you.
Kalman Kaplan
While some biblical narratives have no roots in philosophical reflection, others are founded on philosophical ideas and ideals. Job and Ecclesiastes immediately come to mind. Much of Leviticus 19 is founded on philosophical premises (even if they are not explicitly announced). The same is true of the books of the Prophets and some Psalms.
The reasons for this neglect, beside those mentioned by you, are in the traditional separation between Reason and Faith, between the Secular and the Sacred, even the American separation between State and Religion. There is no such separation in the Bible and in Judaism, and there is no justification to impose it on Philosophy or on Religion (other than the practical considerations of the United States).
My own work—notably in the last twenty years—has focused on the philosophical foundations of some biblical texts.
I hope this trend will expand and congratulate Shalem on its initiative and involvement.
I would find this venue to be fascinating and challenging, but being a Hebrew Bible scholar who focuses attention on Hebrew Bible Theology, I would not rush into analogies of relevancy from the Bible to our current lives.
In my studies I delve into theological issues which the Israeli society constantly is occupied with, such as concepts of God in times of war and national distress / ideologies of war; as also national and group identities (like Israel and the Diaspora of the 6-5 centuries BCE) -- in all I allow my students / audience to draw analogies and conclusions outside our classroom study, so that I would not sound (first of all to myself) as a Rabbi, which is beyond my skills and interests.
Christian theology is more akin to such connections since they allow 'systematic theology' as a scholarly field. In Jewish studies we usually recognize such systematization as non-scholarly, non-academic.
While these supposed stolen holy writings, have sustained the Jewish people through some of the most horrible times in history. Yet, they failed; so completely, believed by modern scholars, their original cultures. Imagine a chronology, independent of Roman, or Western thought, based only upon science. What kind of philosophy could be realized from ancient Jewish works? Maybe you'd find a real reason, to the purpose of Abraham offering up his precious son as a sacrifice, only to receive a substitute in the end.
A great beginning for your task if, I may be so bold. Would be to determine how valid the chronology, that archaeology except for kernels constantly disproves, is. This chronology formulated between 90 A.D. and the fifth century A.D. completed only in 1650 A.D., and first published in 1701 in the King James Bible. Are we sure that span of 1560 years has the truth that we can trust, today in the light of modern archaeological findings? Or is it the truth that modern scholars are forcing the archaeological evidence into an archaic timeline with the resulting effect of kernels everywhere?
I wish Shalem Center the very best success in achieving something other than the same old, same old regarding these ancient texts. Normally what comes from such an examination is a cultured, refined anti-Semitism so delicate it often skips realization of what it really is.
what reception is given to truth so long as it is truth. Naysayers will always use rhetorical tools to prove their position and lessen cognitive dissonance. You have the opportunity to relate the effects of biblical principles. That effort could be oriented toward more hard science, as seen by Joshua Knobe's experimental philosophy. This could put the thrust of energy in the realm of the tangible and
out of the rhetorical haze often found in philosophy.
For example, Bell's theorem found that in quantum entanglement, with experimentation, there are no local hidden variables or counterfactual definiteness. That could be applied toward the entanglement of the distinct objects of biblical ethics and human behavioral option's models which include not lying, or stealing, or murdering etc. and their natural (positive or negative) sanctions that reinforce either choice. The philosophy of the Hebrew Bible may be risque to some people but it has stood the test of
time and that substance should be robustly and qualitatively examined.
interest and hope one day to take in some of the lectures in Jerusalem.
All the best in this exciting project.
I sympathize with your annoyance about being declined; I have a slightly different interpretation of what happened. I offer this interpretation with the advertisements that (a) I am a longtime subscriber to a few mailing lists, mostly in philosophy, and have seen this sort of scope-based declination many times before, (b) I don’t have an immediate sense of which mailing list you are referring to, and (c) I have no stake in whether your posting is accepted or not by any particular mailing list, in any case.
Here are my thoughts.
First, I’d have to agree that, on the basis of the conference title alone (and for reasons which I elaborate on below), there should be no principled reason (i.e. scope-related) to reject the posting of the announcement by a general purpose philosophy list. I think that’s actually independent of any other decision they might make regarding, for example, the philosophy of pornography or philosophy of any other X.
Second, it strikes me as reasonably coherent for the mailing list managers to declare theological or scriptural postings out of scope if they apply such a rule so as to include philosophy of religion which touches, naturally enough, on theology or scripture. The same point would go, mutatis mutandis, for declaring postings out of scope if they concern the poetry of aesthetics, but not the aesthetics of poetry.
Third, upon reading the actual announcement, I can see how the mailing list managers might have judged the conference to be out of scope on the basis of the repeated references to “philosophical theology”. Here is where we touch on the tricky distinction between “philosophical theology” and “philosophy of religion”. There is a sense in which the distinction is not tricky at all: the former is a branch of theology, pursued with the tools of philosophy; and the latter is a branch of philosophy, tout court. This is more or less the going view of the distinction and it is usefully exploited by Philosophy, Religion, Theology, and other academic departments in the West to meaningfully distinguish between different course offerings, kinds of faculty expertise, and so forth. There is, then, at a minimum a kind of sociological and utilitarian set of reasons for embracing or sustaining that distinction. In short, if “philosophical theology” is not philosophy per se but something closer to religious studies, then the list manager was within bounds for finding the conference to be out of bounds.
Fourth, it occurs to me that one of the points of this project and this conference may be to blur, or attempt to redefine, the lines between “philosophical theology” and some standard areas in philosophy. Or at least that might have been the case I would have made to the Templeton Foundation when seeking their funding, given their interests and inclinations. I can easily accept that such a “redefining” perspective would, at a minimum, make the project and the conference at least borderline acceptable for a general philosophy framework (such as the mailing list in question apparently represents), if not wholly acceptable.
In this regard, I think one important parallel in thinking about (a) the reading of traditional Jewish texts and (b) professional philosophy in the West is (c) the institutional treatment of non-Western philosophy, e.g. African, Asian, and various aboriginal or folkloric traditions in philosophy or of philosophical bent. Many, though not all, such traditions do not cleanly map on to philosophy in the Western tradition; many are spiritual in origin and in their present dominant character; many have far more and richer traditions of study in departments of religion and the like. But when proponents of their study in “strictly” (institutionally) philosophical contexts make the case for examining such texts as philosophy, a variety of interesting issues arise, and the outcome is varied. Some such traditions have decent play in some philosophical quarters—ethics comes to mind—but generally speaking the scholars working in those areas are found in departments of Religion and their other-named counterparts. (I’m not sure this is a total disaster, intellectually or otherwise, so long as diverse and robust investigations are conducted, no matter the institutional frameworks.)
Fifth, to make matters trickier still, and in full consideration of my not having a vote in the least, if I did have one I would vote to define your project not as “philosophical theology” but rather a traditional project in the history of philosophy. In short: here are some texts; we think they are foundational to understanding latter developments in the history of philosophy; and we think that, like other historical texts in philosophy, there are going to be claims and arguments there which continue to have merit; and our project is to give philosophical life to them, reintegrate them into the philosophical canon, and so forth. The word “theology” doesn’t really belong in this account, except by way of saying that traditionally these texts have a root theological origin and continue to be viewed in that way by the communities most closely associated with those texts. As the enterprise of history of philosophy is concerned, it’s a contingency (a fortuitous one, to be sure) that the communities who see these texts as living theological documents happen to be alive and well. After all, might we not benefit in similar respects when doing the history of philosophy if that were true of the Presocratics? And if we could so benefit, we would still be doing history of philosophy, and not (necessarily, anyway) philosophical theology.
Hope this helps give a charitable framing to this set of issues.
the Chistians wanted to kill us but they got over it(now some of them get back into that again)
the Muslims extracted and twisted our Ideas, the Source, which they want to kill.
So they can appear as the Source, they think they have to kill or convert. so they can be the Source.
You have shown this with the rejection of philisophical study in a contemporary light of the Hebrew Bible. This precious item may even be banned in the future.
Relegated to locked archives.
We were taught the Enlightenment is the structural foundation for America. Later I learned of the Iroquois Confederacy influence. What was the influence of the Hebrew Bible?
The influence of the Hebrew Bible on the Founders could be integrated into basic American history classes, if we try to save this sinking ship and ourselves.
One need only think of some random examples such as Samuels plea against appointing a King, or the interpretation that the Talmud puts on the 'eye for an eye' passage in
the Torah.
I wish you luck, and hope to read your final output
I have to laugh. If the Bible really WAS revealed, then who cares what category it falls under, whether reason or revelation? Learn the damn thing, because whatever it is, it is the TRUTH. I mean, it would be very absurd for a philosopher to say, "Well, I believe that the Bible was given to us by the omniscient creator of the universe, but I don't have time to read it, because I'm too busy seeing where my human reason will lead." On the other hand, if you don't think the Bible was revealed, then apparently, some HUMAN(S) authored it, and if so, then ipso facto it is a product of their reason and cognitive faculties and philosophical opinions. Either you're religious and you think the Bible is inerrant, or you're not and you think the Bible was authored by humans. (I am using the terms "religious" and "not" religious very loosely, of course.) Either way, it should merit attention, no?
I just want to tell you
Hazak ubaruch- keep up the wonderful work.