The future of Jewish philosophy

CHAPTER 39
The future of Jewish philosophy
Oliver Leaman
It is difficult to make any sensible predictions about the future of anything, let alone
philosophy, but the fact that something is difficult should not mean that it is not
undertaken. It is worth speculating on the future of a subject, since that makes possible
reflection on its present state, and how that existing condition might develop in particular
directions. Philosophy is perhaps the most obstinate cultural phenomenon to relate to the
material conditions of its production, although this may not be such a problem when we
are looking at a particular tradition in philosophy. Jewish philosophy essentially uses the
ways of working philosophically which are current in its time, and adapts those
techniques to a range of specific problems which have a Jewish interest. So in a sense
speculating on the future of Jewish philosophy is a subsidiary activity to speculating on
the future of philosophy itself, and that would certainly take us a long way from this
particular topic. Is it not possible, though, to look at the main lines of work in the recent
past, and work out what the leading issues and approaches will be in the future?
One reason why it is difficult to predict the future is that there is no accounting for the
appearance of great and creative thinkers who revolutionize the subject. It is very much
part of the nature of creativity that it is difficult to work out what is going to happen in
the future, since the creative thinker transforms the subject and creates entirely new ways
of working. It is certainly true that this is done on the basis of the existing tradition, and it
makes sense to talk of creativity only when compared with an existing tradition, yet one
cannot use the tradition as a source for prediction of the next creative leap. If one could,
this would not be a leap, but very much of a step. When we consider the nature of Jewish
philosophy we need to take seriously the impact of modernity on the Jewish world, which
results in many philosophers of Jewish origin ignoring what might be called specifically
Jewish philosophy. Two of the major thinkers of the twentieth century, Ludwig
Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida, albeit working within very different traditions, are of
Jewish origin, yet they did not work within what might be called Jewish philosophy. A
good example of the contrast between philosophy and Jewish philosophy is provided in
the case of Emmanuel Levinas, whose early work was entirely within what might be
called pure philosophy, and whose later work is determinedly and self-consciously part of
Jewish philosophy.
If there can be said to be a central issue which occurs in the Jewish philosophy of the
twentieth century it is precisely this discussion of how Jewish philosophers are to react to
modernity, to the relationship of Jews with the wider cultural and social community of
which they are a part. This issue has arisen over the last few centuries, as Jews have
progressively become more and more integrated within their local societies. Here we
need to make some distinctions between different Jewish communities, and it is worth
acknowledging that there are significant numbers of Jews living in non-Jewish
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communities yet doing all they can to ignore their surroundings. They pursue the
traditional ways of learning and study, and maintain religious practices which seek to
preserve past forms of worship. For them there is no need to change their ways of
understanding the theoretical bases of what they are doing, since the existing forms of
theoretical inquiry are acceptable. That is not to suggest that they do not incorporate
within those forms new ways of operating. We have seen how quite recently a figure like
Rav Soloveitchik manages to combine Orthodoxy with ideas from secular philosophy,
and this is not in itself a new development. Jews intent on pursuing a traditional lifestyle
have continued throughout history to use the contemporary culture of the gentile world to
help reconstruct that sort of lifestyle.
One might expect that Orthodox communities would do all in their power to reject
modernity, and to reject the theoretical systems which go along with it. Of course, some
do try, yet in a sense even they fail, since in turning their back on a system of thought,
one is irretrievably influenced by it, even just through adopting a strategy to try to avoid
it. So even those Jews who are not prepared to question the idea of Torah min HaShamayim are obliged to explain how that idea fits in with secular understandings of the
world, since those understandings are all around them in their everyday lives. This point
becomes far more clear when we look at Jewish communities which live very much as
parts of the gentile world, wearing the same clothes, speaking the same language, doing
the same work and having similar aspirations. Rosenzweig described this situation nicely
at the start of the twentieth century when considering conversion to Christianity. He
points out that Jews are already really part of Christian society, so that in a sense they are
already Christians in all but name. They seem to persist stubbornly in a distinctness
which their lifestyle denies. Would it not be more authentic, he suggests, to throw in the
towel and take the step of assimilating completely with the sort of society of which one is
so surely a part?
We know now, as he did not, that gentile society was shortly to throw off its Jews in
Germany and Europe generally, and that assimilation was no escape for Jews seeking to
avoid destruction. Yet the questions raised by assimilation at the end of the twentieth
century are the same as they were at the beginning, and the experience of the Holocaust
does not appear to have changed the nature of the problem. In many parts of the world
Jews live valued and satisfying lives as parts of the general community, while within the
State of Israel they live as normal citizens of a specifically Jewish state. Indeed, some
would argue that in the State of Israel the normal state of affairs has been inverted, so that
it is the non-Jewish minorities who have problems of identity in pursuing their sense of
who they are by contrast with the dominance of Jewish culture and the Hebrew language!
If Israel comes to live in relative peace with its neighbors, the question of assimilation
will arise yet again, since there will be a small Jewish state in the middle of a large Arab
and Persian world. The creators of Zionism saw Israel as far more than just another
Levantine state, yet this is a status which might appear to be very desirable by
comparison with the constant history of strife which has existed in the Middle East in the
twentieth century.
So the question of whether to assimilate might arise both nationally (in Israel) and in
the Diaspora. In an increasingly secular world, it is only the embattled nature of the State
of Israel which provides a distinctive status to many Jews in the Diaspora, for whom
Zionism has replaced Judaism as the main source of their cultural and ethnic identity.
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Peace would raise important issues of identity both for Israelis and for Jews worldwide.
Of course, this would not be an issue for those Jews with a strong commitment to their
religion, but it may be that there will be a growing proportion of Jews who find their
religion an anachronism, who wonder what it means when they can find no personal faith
to cohere with the ethnic differentiation that separates them from the rest of the
population of their countries. When being Jewish is an affiliation with no clear
advantages or no obvious point to it, the question as to whether it has any meaning at all
will arise in the future, as it has arisen throughout the recent past and arises today.
It might be argued that in the absence of any strong religious faith, there is no point in
raising the issue of whether one should remain Jewish. It is like finding oneself a member
of a tennis club, yet without any interest in tennis. Of course, there could be good reasons
for staying in the tennis club apart from the tennis. It might be a good social community,
it might have other attractions, but these features might be acquired in better and more
direct ways by joining a different sort of club. If one is a non-player in a tennis club, it
looks as though one is pretending to a status which one does not really deserve. This is
why Rosenzweig criticized, for a period, the distinctiveness of Jewish life in a Christian
society. If one is not Jewish in anything but a nominal sense, then it seems more honest to
abandon the cultural affiliation just as one has abandoned the religious commitment. If he
is right that a decision either way has to be taken here, that one has to decide to be a Jew
or not, it is interesting to speculate what sorts of arguments could be produced to settle
the issue, given stronger pressures for assimilation. Of course, the question might not
arise, since as Sartre suggested, one is a Jew often as a result of being regarded as a Jew
by others, and this ethnic label might be harder to discard than one imagines, but the
assumption here is that a level of assimilation may occur which makes being Jewish for
many Jews a puzzling and vacuous description.
Another important issue could well be the nature of Jewish philosophy itself. As
readers of this volume will by now no doubt have discovered, if they did not already
know it, the nature of Jewish philosophy is itself a controversial issue in Jewish
philosophy. Is Jewish philosophy merely the application of general philosophical
techniques to specifically Jewish issues? Or is it a separate type of philosophy which
operates in tandem with those general techniques, offering a unique way of settling
philosophical issues on the basis of its own rules? There are problems with accepting
either proposal. This is not an issue which affects only Jewish philosophy, but has been
much discussed in relationship to Christian and Islamic philosophy. How will this
discussion move into the future? One development which is certainly called for is a
clarification of the nature of Jewish philosophy. At the moment a lot of what goes under
this description is rather vague in structure. There is no clear differentiation between the
religious and the philosophical parts of the discussion. Why is this a problem? It is a
problem because it is very unclear what the nature of the discussion actually is when
there is a constant mingling of different theoretical approaches. Philosophical argument
works to different rules as compared, say, with theology, and theology works to different
rules as compared with Midrash, or Jewish history. Yet a good deal of what is called
Jewish philosophy mixes up these different techniques, so that one is confronted with a
conceptual mixture which provides far too rich a fuel for the engine of argument.
This might seem a surprising suggestion, since is it not precisely the combination of
philosophy with aspects of Jewish culture which one would expect to find in Jewish
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philosophy? Otherwise in what sense is it Jewish? It is certainly true that it would be very
surprising if Jewish philosophers did not discuss aspects of specifically Jewish culture in
their work, but what is important is how they do it. In some ways the subject has declined
in depth since the Middle Ages, since then there was a clear differentiation of the
different forms of expression, so that it was clear that Talmud had a different purpose and
rules from, say, a type of logical analysis. This did not mean that one could not use logic
to explicate Talmud—certainly this was done, and there is no reason why it should not be
done—but there was an attempt to be clear about the different rules of thought which are
exemplified by the different forms of theory as represented by, say, Talmud and logic.
There was a general theory which explained how these different forms of thought fitted in
with each other, and it was argued that it is very important that we are clear on what is
going on in an example of analysis before we compare it with an example from a
different form of analysis. Thinkers like Maimonides and Abraham ibn Ezra, for
example, spend a good deal of time in their writings explaining how the various forms of
theory in Judaism relate to each other, and how they all relate to philosophy. This has the
advantage of explaining to the reader precisely what is going on, or what is supposed to
be going on, in their arguments. Much of contemporary Jewish philosophy has
abandoned this tradition of seeking clarification of the methodology which is
presupposed by the activity itself, and it shows.
In what ways does this disinclination to examine the form of analysis which one is
using become evident? Let us take as an example much of the writing on the Holocaust,
which takes the form of what an Aristotelian would call rhetoric. How does this form of
writing go on? There is often a bit of description of the horrors of the Holocaust, one or
two biblical passages slung in, a little talmudic or midrashic commentary, some
references perhaps to more recent events, and a conclusion which often involves adopting
some emotional attitude to suffering, and recommending that attitude as the conclusion of
a process of reasoning in Jewish philosophy. What is confusing about this form of
expression is that it is far from clear how one derives the conclusion, in the sense that the
logical processes which are in operation are mysterious. They often bear more
relationship to a sermon in a synagogue than they do to a piece of argumentation. There
is nothing wrong with this, of course, since there is an important role for the sort of
discourse which ministers produce in synagogues. Much of this discourse is designed to
get the congregation to act in particular ways, and the skillful speaker will know how to
address the congregation in ways which will be effective. This form of expression is
hardly appropriate for anything which goes under the description of philosophy, though,
since its argumentative value may be rather slight.
We do need to make a sharp distinction between the emotional value of a discourse,
and the validity of an argument. The trouble with a lot of what goes on as though it were
Jewish philosophy is that it has far too much rhetorical resonance in it, and this works
often in opposition to its logical force. There are problems even when discussing topics
which have a weaker emotional force, perhaps those which relate to general theoretical
approaches to issues such as justice or equality within the Jewish tradition. Writers are
often highly selective in their use of particular halakhic passages, which enables them to
defend a certain view of halakhah as the Jewish halakhic view, whereas in fact it is only
one of several. When one discusses halakhah it is certainly appropriate to consider a
range of solutions to a particular problem, and then argue that despite a disparity of view,
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a certain conclusion may be plausibly taken to be the majority view, or the view which
has the strongest arguments on its side. Within halakhah, and within a particular halakhic
tradition, there are clear rules as to how to go on here, since the names and types of
authorities are clear, and the ways in which one can adjudicate between different
approaches is laid down within the tradition. This is not to suggest that only one such
conclusion will be acceptable as a result of such a process of argument, since this is far
from the case. But there are secure ways of reaching consensus on how to approach such
issues, and although disputants may disagree on which conclusion represents the best
view, within the context of the tradition, they can all agree on the sources to be examined
and the techniques to be used in such a process. Jewish philosophers, by contrast, will
often take a highly selective range of quotations from relevant texts which they will then
argue are representative of the tradition as a whole, and which they then use in
combination with their selection of philosophical techniques to argue to a conclusion
which is the Jewish conclusion, and this introduces a looseness and implausibility in the
analysis which reduces its value considerably.
Does this mean that it is never appropriate to take a religious text, say a talmudic
passage, and then examine it using a particular philosophical technique? This would be
an extraordinary claim to make, and is far from the point here. What is methodologically
suspect is taking such a text, examining it philosophically, and then producing some
conclusion which claims to represent the Jewish position on the topic at issue. Jewish
philosophers should demonstrate at least as great respect for the variety of interpretations
of religious texts as do hala-khists, talmudists, historians, and so on. There is a particular
danger in pursuing philosophy in that philosophers think, quite rightly, that they are using
the most abstract forms of argument which are capable of producing absolutely valid
conclusions, provided that their premises are appropriately organized. But this proviso is
important, and one should beware of using a few religious premises and then deriving a
conclusion which is representative of the religion as a whole. That conclusion may well
be representative of an aspect of the religion, but cannot be taken to be generally
representative of the religion as a whole without forcing a complex and indeterminate set
of ideas into a conceptual straitjacket from which it will always struggle to escape.
This is not only a problem for Jewish philosophy, nor even for religious philosophy,
but is a problem for any form of philosophy which is going to set out to analyze a wide
range of statements from an entirely different form of expression. It is a problem for any
sort of applied philosophy which has to cope with new facts and problems, and which
then tries to fit them within some theoretical perspective. One of the reasons why the
normally sober processes of Jewish philosophy have become somewhat derailed in the
twentieth century is the emotional impact of major events such as the Holocaust and the
creation of the State of Israel. It is very difficult to step back from such events and
examine them dispassionately, since we are still too close to them for this to be possible.
Besides, they exist within a political context which surely influences what we say about
them philosophically. For example, a lot of effort is expended by some Jewish
philosophers in arguing that the Holocaust is a unique event, and not just an evil event
which differs from others solely in its scale. These philosophers give the Holocaust a
metaphysical status which, they say, distinguishes it from what happened to the Jewish
people in the past and from disasters which destroyed other ethnic communities in the
past and present. Now, it is difficult to understand this as an argument unless one is aware
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of the fact that there are political groups at large which deny the fact and size of the
Holocaust, and which seek to diminish the significance of Jewish suffering during that
period. The Holocaust also plays a role in the justification for the creation of the State of
Israel and the consequent displacement of the Arabs from the state, so it is felt to be
important that its uniqueness is emphasized in order to provide a rationale for actions of
which one might otherwise be expected to disapprove. It is very difficult for Jewish
philosophers to stand back from these major events and disregard the political
atmosphere which surrounds them, since those philosophers are themselves breathing the
atmosphere and react emotionally to those events. None the less, it must be admitted that
this is unlikely to be a fruitful context for the production of clear and analytical thought
which really throws light on the nature of these events. Much of the work on the
Holocaust brings this out nicely. What we find here is not so much Jewish philosophy,
but varied reflections on Jewish experience which is still too shocked by the disaster to be
able to come to terms with it philosophically. This is understandable, but it does not make
for very valuable philosophy.
This is certainly not to suggest that the philosopher has to be abstracted from the
situation which he or she is discussing. On the contrary, it is important to be able to relate
emotionally to many issues and problems in order to understand them. That is, unless one
can grasp from an experiential point of view what it would be like to be in a particular
situation, one does not understand what that situation is, and so one’s analysis of it is
essentially limited and restricted. This is not true of all issues, of course, but there are
some where it is. We might look here at the Passover festival, where Jews are told that
they should think of themselves as though they themselves had left Egypt, so that the
celebration is not just a commemoration of something which happened to other people in
a distant past. Jews who could not do this, who just could not carry out the exercise in
empathy here would be able to think rationally about aspects of the festival, and they
would be able, for example, to explore the notion of liberation. Yet part of what it means
to be free is to experience freedom, to contrast one’s present position with that of the
past, and one of the reasons why freedom is important for human beings lies in the fact
that its possession can be a wonderful experience. The detached observer can only
understand this from observing people’s behavior, not through his or her own experience,
and as a result would miss something of the significance of the concept of freedom. On
the other hand, it would probably be difficult to carry out a philosophical analysis of the
concept of freedom while its experience is still fresh in the mind. It would be difficult to
become sufficiently detached to relate it to other concepts and experiences, and place it
within some sort of wider context. This is very much the position today of people writing
about the Holocaust and the State of Israel. They are often responding to an emotional
agenda which precludes the sort of detachment such philosophical analysis requires,
whereas in the future it should be possible both to carry out such analysis and also think
back to the experiences which are so important a part of those events.
How will the history of Jewish philosophy be understood in the future? It is possible
that thinkers will be more ambitious about what Jewish philosophy can achieve. Different
Jewish philosophers often think that their views on how to resolve particular
philosophical difficulties are better than opposing views, and they tend to think that there
exists such a thing as progress in philosophy, in the sense that our concepts become
progressively more refined and we approach nearer to the truth. On the other hand, there
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800
are plenty of thinkers in this area who take a more guarded attitude to the idea of progress
in philosophy, and they see their task as essentially historical, as one of explaining and
discussing the various solutions which have been produced at different times to persisting
philosophical problems, while not necessarily making any value-judgment as to which
solution is preferable to another. It has to be said that this sort of attitude is not
uncommon given the positioning of most Jewish philosophy not in philosophy
departments, but in departments primarily concerned with Semitic studies, Near Eastern
languages and cultures, religious studies, and, of course, Jewish studies. This means that
there is often a scholarly concern with the editing of texts, the translation and collection
of relevant materials, and the relating of particular texts to their antecedents. All this
work is very important and valuable, and the study of Jewish philosophy would be
impossible without it, yet it is worth noting that it gives the subject the flavor more of the
history of ideas or the history of philosophy than of philosophy itself.
Will writers in the future be happy to continue along the same path? Some certainly
will, and it is not unlikely that very similar work will take place in the future as has gone
on in the past, and is going on today. On the other hand, it is also not unlikely that the
very real issue of assimilation will induce writers on Jewish philosophy to take a more
personal interest in their subject, and they will ask themselves questions about the
relevance of what they are doing for their lives as Jews. It will not be enough to conclude
that they are analyzing key concepts of Jewish thought, even though objectively this is
indeed what they are doing. The issue will be how far these concepts become
progressively refined and better understood as a result of their investigations. A dilemma
will arise as a result of such a question, and the dilemma is that it often looks as though
despite the efforts of writers on Jewish philosophy, there is not much in the way of
progress here. Do we really today understand more what it means to regulate our lives in
accordance with halakhah than, say, Maimonides did? Do we know more about how to
reconcile a good and omnipotent God with innocent suffering than Job did? How far has
our understanding of the links between our world and God improved on the model
produced by Philo? Is our understanding of what it means to be a good person superior to
that outlined in the Torah?
We need to distinguish here between a variety of theoretical treatments which takes
place over time, and which brings out more and different features of familiar problems,
and a progression in understanding the problem. We certainly tend to see problems in
Jewish philosophy somewhat differently from our predecessors, since we are operating in
a very different conceptual world, yet they might still wonder whether there was much
difference in our treatment of the issue apart from a changed way of reproducing it.
Perhaps this is unduly pessimistic, but there does not seem to have been much progress in
the treatment of the sorts of problems which constitute the main content of Jewish
philosophy. One might expect that over a period of time prolonged investigation of a
particular topic would result in ever-increasing conceptual clarification, yet this does not
seem to have come about. On the other hand, it could be that this view of how concepts
becomes clarified as a result of sustained investigation relies too much on a comparison
with natural science, where one expects that prolonged investigation of a problem will
result, eventually, in its solution. There is no reason to think that philosophy is like that,
and there probably is little reason to think that natural science is like that either. Yet this
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leaves us with the apparent paradox that Jewish philosophers are involved in an
enterprise which does not come to any final result.
If this is true now, then it is likely to be true in the future. There is no reason to think
that there will suddenly be a vast conceptual breakthrough which will allow us to solve
philosophical problems which have defied resolution for thousands of years. Does this
not mean that the whole enterprise is meaningless? If there is no clear criterion of
progress here, then what is the point of the whole enterprise? It may have an extrinsic
point, of course, to give some people jobs and other people something interesting to read,
but these seem rather weak as aims of the project of Jewish philosophy as a whole. We
can certainly appreciate why an aesthetic enterprise need not come to an end, since we
have here a variety of ways of representing feelings and facts which can be expected to
change over time to reflect changing historical and cultural factors, and which are by no
means any worse for that. It would be difficult to argue that there is no longer any point
in writing poems about roses, since there have been lots of such poems over the years,
and they do not seem to be getting anywhere. Jewish philosophy cannot be compared
with poetry, though, since it is not the aim of Jewish philosophy to present gracefully
constructed arguments and skillful collections of bons mots as an end in itself, although
Jewish philosophy may on occasion contain these literary forms. The point of Jewish
philosophy is to get close to the truth concerning the persistent conceptual problems
which have been discussed within the subject since the time that the Torah was given to
the Jewish people. If it has to limit itself to recounting a history of possible solutions,
none of which is compelling, we shall inevitably have to conclude that we are not really
dealing here with philosophy but just with the history of ideas.
If the argument here is successful, then is it not just too successful, in that it implies
that all philosophy, and not just Jewish philosophy, is an interminable representation of
unsatisfactory solutions which vary over time only by virtue of the different ways in
which a number of points are made? This would be a pessimistic conclusion to be forced
to adopt, and there is no necessity to go along with it. We have to remember that Jewish
philosophy is limited only to certain areas of philosophy, primarily ethics, political
philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of religion and jurisprudence, whereas philosophy
as a whole contains subdivisions such as epistemology and logic, for example, where it
may be more sensible to talk of progress being made over time. What will be required if
there is to be progress in Jewish philosophy is a systematic study of Judaism as a whole,
and the linking of that study to philosophy. At the moment this is rarely undertaken, since
it is such a major task. And once one thinks about it, it is quite evident that there is no
prospect of any final and complete success, since the most important question which has
yet to be resolved concerns the nature of Judaism itself.
There is not just one notion of Judaism, in just the same way that there is not just one
definition of who is a Jew. Given this fact, it is hardly surprising that there is never going
to be an all-encompassing Jewish philosophy. What we have to acknowledge, and
respect, is that different Jews have different attitudes to their religion, and to the forms of
Judaism which make sense to them. This is far from being an entirely logical issue, but is
often affected by one’s emotional relationship to the sort of religion which resonates with
one’s personality. This accounts for the varying nature of the subject, since it is obvious
that in different contexts different forms of religion will be felt to be appropriate by
different thinkers. In the future we might expect that greater significance will be applied
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to this notion of what it is in religion which accords with what we expect to find, what we
think we need, in other words, a reassertion of the significance of subjectivity. There is a
tendency to think of philosophy as primarily an objective and logical form of inquiry, and
this is certainly appropriate, yet it is also true that when philosophy starts to examine that
which forms a part of the emotional and personal life of individuals, it has to respond to
those aspects of human life. It can seek to reject them as not proper objects of
philosophical study, but it does so at its peril, since the result is a denuded analysis of
religion, a description which often omits the flavor of the activity while trying to preserve
its essence. Yet the flavor is part of the essence, and often the most significant part of the
essence for practitioners.
One of the main novel developments in the last two centuries has been a reassertion of
subjectivity as a significant philosophical concept. This change was signaled by
Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and strongly taken up by Rosenzweig and Buber. It plays an
important role as a corrective to the long tradition of philosophy which emphasizes the
objective. It is vital to have some grasp of the role of subjectivity in philosophy if one is
going to examine religion, since the nexus of ideas connected to faith and the religious
lifestyle are strongly bound together by the felt experience of the believer.
We might expect that in the future the analysis of the subjective will proceed rapidly
until it achieves some sort of balance with the existing work on the objective aspects of
Judaism, and out of the synthesis of these two crucial categories a new and valuable
perspective on the religion will result. It may be that this is not really going to take place.
After all, when a millennium comes to an end there tends to be an increase of interest in
the spiritual and emotional aspects of human life, and, although the millennium is an
entirely Christian date, there is little doubt that most Jews will be affected by the general
cultural interests of the communities in which they live. It is easy to laugh at the confused
and confusing claims of those interested in personal growth, mysticism, and Eastern
religion, yet their claims are a reaction to what they see, quite rightly, as an absence of
spirituality in everyday life. Once this interest in spirituality is connected to the tradition
of analytical Jewish philosophy, one might with some confidence expect some very
fruitful results.
So there is an exciting prospect for the future of Jewish philosophy.
Increasing pressures for assimilation will lead thinkers to reassess
constantly their precise relationship with Judaism, what it means for them
both emotionally and rationally to be Jewish. Now that philosophers are
discussing seriously what the significance of subjectivity is, it will be
possible to discuss in some depth how we are to assess the notion of
subjectivity, and how to differentiate between a variety of emotional and
personal attitudes to one’s faith. Combined with this debate will be the
tradition of Jewish philosophy as it has reached us today, dealing as it does
with the analyses of the main concepts which arise from a logical
approach to Judaism. This all constitutes very rich material which could
well result in a future development of Jewish philosophy which will take it
in a novel and satisfying direction.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Akhtar, S. (1995) “The Possibility of a Philosophy of Islam,” in The
History of Islamic Philosophy edited by S.H.Nasr and O.Leaman (London:
Routledge), pp. 1162–9.
Leaman, O. (1995a) “The Future of Philosophy,” Futures 27.1:81–90.
——(1995b) “Introduction” and “Back to the Bible,” in Evil and Suffering
in Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 1–18,
220–50.
——(1995c) “Introduction,” in The History of Islamic Philosophy, edited
by S.H. Nasr and O.Leaman (London: Routledge), pp. 1–10.
——(1995d) “Is a Jewish Practical Philosophy Possible?,” in
Commandment and Community: New Essays in Jewish Legal and
Political Philosophy, edited by D.Frank (Albany: State University of New
York Press), pp. 55–68.