A Guide to Jewish Studies: Philosophy

"This volume surveys the history of Jewish philosophy from antiquity to the early modern period. There are sections on logic and language, natural philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of mind and psychology, metaphysics and philosophical theology, and practical philosophy." - from the publisher

This phenomenally successful book, which has sold nearly a half a million copies since its original publication in 1983, is Gloria Steinem's most diverse and timeless collection of essays.

"A collection of her most incisive essays and unpublished speeches, Life and Death makes it clear why Dworkin has found her place in the canon of modern political thought. She begins here with a poignant autobiographical piece, in which she recounts with rare tenderness her childhood in Camden, New Jersey, her political odyssey, and the crushing pain of her brother's death. Lending her hand to tragic current events, or what she calls "emergencies," like the murder of.Nicole Brown Simpson, the Hedda Nussbaum child abuse case, and the mass murder of female students at a college in Montreal, Dworkin makes clear in her inimitable way the obvious things we stubbornly fail to notice. Finally, she guides us back to the core issues at stake in women's lives - pornography, domestic violence, rape, and prostitution - and reminds us that even after decades of feminist so-called progress, gender is an ongoing war." - from the publisher

"Hélène Cixous is more than an influential theorist. She is also a groundbreaking author and playwright. Combining an idiosyncratic mix of autobiographical and fictional narrative with a host of philosophical and poetic observations, Cixous's writing matches the kaleidoscopic nature of her thought, offering new ways of conceptualizing sex, relationships, identity, and the self, among other topics. Yet, as Jacques Derrida once observed, a "profound misunderstanding" hangs over the accomplishments of Cixous, with many believing the intellectual excelled only at theoretical exploration. Providing a truly liberal selection of her writings from throughout her career, Marta Segarra rediscovers Cixous's acts of invention for a new generation to enjoy. Divided into thematic concerns, these works fully capture Cixous's genius for merging fiction, theory, and the experience of living. They discuss dreaming in the feminine, Algeria and Germany, love and the other, the animal, Derrida, and the theater. They defy classification, locking literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis into thrilling new patterns of engagement. Whether readers are familiar with Cixous or are approaching her thought for the first time, all will find fresh perspectives on gender, fiction, drama, philosophy, religion, and the postcolonial." - from the publisher

"Describes the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women's confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the average woman first married in her teens and 60 percent of women students dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives." - from the publisher

This collection of twenty-four volumes is the first full paperback publication of the standard edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud in English.

"Tristes Tropiques was an immensely popular bestseller when it was first published in France in 1955. Claude Lévi-Strauss's ground-breaking study of the societies of a number of Amazonian peoples is a cornerstone of structural anthropology and an exploration by the author of his own intellectual roots as a professor of philosophy in Brazil before the Second World War, as a Jewish exile from Nazi-occupied Europe, and later as a world-renowned academic (he taught at New York's New School for Social Research and was French cultural attaché to the United States). Lévi-Strauss's central journey leads from the Amazon basin through the dense upland jungles of Brazil. There, among the Amerindian tribes--the Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib--he found "a human society reduced to its most basic expression." Lévi-Strauss's discussion of his fieldwork in Tristes Tropiques endures as a milestone of anthropology, but the book is also, in its brilliant diversions on other, more familiar cultures, a great work of literature, a vivid travelogue, and an engaging memoir--a demonstration of the marvelous mental agility of one of the century's most important thinkers." - from the publisher

"In this work the author gives a moving account of his life amid the horrors of the Nazi death camps, chronicling the harrowing experience that led to his discovery of his theory of logotherapy. A profound revelation born out of his years as a prisoner in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, logotherapy is a modern and positive approach to the mentally or spiritually disturbed personality. Stressing man's freedom to transcend suffering and find a meaning to his life regardless of his circumstances, it is a theory which, since its conception, has exercised a tremendous influence upon the entire field of psychiatry and psychology." - from the publisher

"Beginning in the mid-fifties and emanating largely from MIT, an approach was developed in linguistic theory and the study of the structure of languages that diverges in many respects from modern linguistics. Although this approach is connected to the traditional study of languages, it differs enough in its specific conclusions about the structure of language to warrant a name, "generative grammar." Various deficiencies have been discovered in the first attempts to formulate a theory of transformational generative grammar and in the descriptive analysis of the languages that motivated these formulations. At the same time, it has become apparent that these formulations can be extended and deepened. The major purpose of this book is to review these developments and to propose a reformulation of the theory of transformational generative grammar that takes them into account. The emphasis in this study is syntax; semantic and phonological aspects of the language structure are discussed only insofar as they bear on syntactic theory." - from the publisher

"A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution-from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social inequality-and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike--either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society." - from the publisher

A series of influential essays on the visual arts that were made possible by machines, and the implications for the future of culture.

"This is a comprehensive collection of readings from the work of Theodor Adorno, one of the most influential German thinkers of the twentieth century. What took place in Auschwitz revokes what Adorno termed the “Western legacy of positivity,” the innermost substance of traditional philosophy. The prime task of philosophy then remains to reflect on its own failure, its own complicity in such events. Yet in linking the question of philosophy to historical occurrence, Adorno seems not to have abandoned his paradoxical, life-long hope that philosophy might not be entirely closed to the idea of redemption. He prepares for an altogether different praxis, one no longer conceived in traditionally Marxist terms but rather to be gleaned from “metaphysical experience.” In this collection, Adorno's literary executor has assembled the definitive introduction to his thinking. Its five sections anatomize the range of Adorno's concerns: “Toward a New Categorical Imperative,” “Damaged Life,” “Administered World, Reified Thought,” “Art, Memory of Suffering,” and “A Philosophy That Keeps Itself Alive.” A substantial number of Adorno’s writings included appear here in English for the first time. This collection comes with an eloquent introduction from Rolf Tiedemann, the literary executor of Adorno’s work." - from the publisher

"A retrospective article on Leslie Fiedler in the New York Times Book Review in 1965 referred to Love and Death in the American Novel as “one of the great, essential books on the American imagination . . . an accepted major work.” This groundbreaking work views in depth both American literature and character from the time of the American Revolution to the present. From it, there emerges Fiedler’s once scandalous―now increasingly accepted―judgment that our literature is incapable of dealing with adult sexuality and is pathologically obsessed with death." - from the publisher

"There is very little evidence of the historical Jesus--who he was, what he said. As Bloom writes, "There is not a sentence concerning Jesus in the entire New Testament composed by anyone who ever had met the unwilling King of the Jews." Bloom has used his unsurpassed skills as a literary critic to examine the character of Jesus, noting the inconsistencies, contradictions, and logical flaws throughout the Gospels. He also examines the character of Yahweh, who he finds has more in common with Mark's Jesus than he does with God the Father of the Christian and later rabbinic Jewish traditions. At a time when religion has come to take center stage in our political arena, Bloom's shocking conclusion, that there is no Judeo-Christian tradition--that the two histories, Gods, and even Bibles, are not compatible--may make readers rethink everything we take for granted about what we believed was a shared heritage." - from the publisher

"Judith Butler further develops her distinctive theory of gender by examining the workings of power at the most 'material' dimensions of sex and sexuality. Deepening the inquiries she began in Gender Trouble, Butler offers an original reformulation of the materiality of bodies, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the 'matter' of bodies, sex, and gender. Butler argues that power operates to constrain 'sex' from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex. She offers a clarification of the notion of 'performativity' introduced in Gender Trouble and explores the meaning of a citational politics. The text includes readings of Plato, Irigaray, Lacan, and Freud on the formation of materiality and bodily boundaries; 'Paris is Burning,' Nella Larsen's 'Passing,' and short stories by Willa Cather; along with a reconsideration of 'performativity' and politics in feminist, queer, and radical democratic theory." - from the publisher

"Influential enough to have affected the entire French critical scene, Jacques Derrida has been hailed as the most important philosopher in France today. His ideas of reading and writing, his notion of de-construction, his reinterpretations of phenomenology, of psychoanalysis, and of structuralism have profoundly inflenced the vanguard of European and American criticism and have occasioned lively controversy." - from the publisher

"Georg Lukács wrote The Theory of the Novel in 1914-1915, a period that also saw the conception of Rosa Luxemburg's Spartacus Letters, Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Spengler's Decline of the West, and Ernst Bloch's Spirit of Utopia. Like many of Lukács's early essays, it is a radical critique of bourgeois culture and stems from a specific Central European philosophy of life and tradition of dialectical idealism whose originators include Kant, Hegel, Novalis, Marx, Kierkegaard, Simmel, Weber, and Husserl. The Theory of the Novel marks the transition of the Hungarian philosopher from Kant to Hegel and was Lukács's last great work before he turned to Marxism-Leninism." - from the publisher

"The Guide for the Perplexed was written for scholars who were bewildered by the conflict between religion and the scientific and philosophic thought of the day. It is concerned, basically, with finding a concord between the religion of the Old Testament and its commentaries, and Aristotelian philosophy. After analyzing the ideas of the Old Testament by means of "homonyms," Maimonides examines other reconciliations of religion and philosophy (the Moslem rationalists) and then proposes his own resolution with contemporary Aristotelianism. The Guide for the Perplexed was at once recognized as a masterwork, and it strongly influenced Jewish, Christian, and Moslem thought of the Middle Ages. It is necessary reading for any full comprehension of the thought of such scholastics as Aquinas and Scotus, and indispensable for everyone interested in the Middle Ages, Judaism, medieval philosophy, or the larger problems which Maimonides discusses." - from the publisher

"The Collected Works of Spinoza provides, for the first time in English, a truly satisfactory edition of all of Spinoza's writings, with accurate and readable translations, based on the best critical editions of the original-language texts, done by a scholar who has published extensively on the philosopher's work. The elaborate editorial apparatus--including prefaces, notes, glossary, and indexes--assists the reader in understanding one of the world's most fascinating, but also most difficult, philosophers. Of particular interest is the glossary-index, which provides extensive commentary on Spinoza's technical vocabulary. A milestone of scholarship more than forty-five years in the making, The Collected Works of Spinoza is an essential edition for anyone with a serious interest in Spinoza or the history of philosophy." - from the publisher

"Theologian, philosopher, and political radical, Martin Buber (1878-1965) was committed to a fundamental economic and political reconstruction of society as well as the pursuit of international peace. Collected in here are the private and open letters, addresses, and essays - from the Bafour Declaration of November 1917 to his death - in which Buber advocated an active pursuit of mutual accommodation as a solution to the conflict in the Middle East." - from the publisher

"One of the most important scholars of our century, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) opened up a once esoteric world of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, to concerned students of religion. The Kabbalah is a rich tradition of repeated attempts to achieve and portray direct experiences of God: its twelfth-and thirteenth-century beginnings in southern France and Spain are probed in Origins of the Kabbalah, a work crucial in Scholem's oeuvre. The book is a contribution not only to the history of Jewish medieval mysticism but also to the study of medieval mysticism in general and will be of interest to historians and psychologists, as well as to students of the history of religion." - from the publisher

"The book's female protagonist, Dagny Taggart, struggles to manage a transcontinental railroad amid the pressures and restrictions of massive bureaucracy. Her antagonistic reaction to a libertarian group seeking an end to government regulation is later echoed and modified in her encounter with a utopian community, Galt's Gulch, whose members regard self-determination rather than collective responsibility as the highest ideal." - from the publisher

"The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I. Arendt explores the institutions and operations of totalitarian movements, focusing on the two genuine forms of totalitarian government in our time—Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia—which she adroitly recognizes were two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left. From this vantage point, she discusses the evolution of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the nontotalitarian world, the use of terror, and the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination." - from the publisher

"In Humanism of the Other Emmanuel Levinas argues that it is not only possible but of the highest importance to understand one's humanity through the humanity of others. Based in a new appreciation for ethics, and taking new departures from the phenomenology of Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, the idealism of Plato and Kant, and the skepticism of Nietzsche and Blanchot, Levinas rehabilitates humanism and restores its promises." "Painfully aware of the long history of dehumanization that reached its apotheosis in Hitler and Nazism, Levinas does not underestimate the difficulty of reconciling oneself with another. We find our humanity, Levinas argues, not through mathematics, rational metaphysics, or introspection. Rather, it is found in the recognition that the suffering and mortality of others are the obligations and morality of the self." - from the publisher

"Known most widely for his role in the civil rights and peace movements of the 1960s, Abraham Joshua Heschel made major scholarly contributions to the fields of biblical studies, rabbinics, medieval Jewish philosophy, Hasidism, and mysticism. Yet his most ambitious scholarly achievement, his three-volume study of Rabbinic Judaism, originally published in Hebrew between the years 1962 and 1990, is only now appearing in English." - from the publisher