Philosophy

This innovative book investigates "being Jewish” not as a sectarian religiosity but as a way of being-in-the-world particularly suited to understanding Heidegger's early phenomenology. At its core is an intimate engagement with “sacred texts,” which grounds “being Jewish” in a way of life constituted as a way of reading—a way of reading transmitted to succeeding generations as a passionate teaching.

Allen Scult argues that Heidegger was similarly involved in a passionate attempt to introduce his students to philosophical practice through a personal engagement with the words of Aristotle. Scult traces the hermeneutical affinity— even intimacy—between Judaism as a way of life, grounded in an intense interpretive relationship to the Torah; and Heidegger's view of philosophical practice, as a similarly intense interpretive relationship to the founding texts of Western philosophy.

In tracing the dynamics of this relationship in Heideggerian and Jewish hermeneutics, Scult not only finds mutually enlightening points of contact between the two, but also uncovers new ways of understanding how Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is grounded in the lived experience of religion.
Allen Scult is National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Philosophy and Rhetoric at Drake University. He is co-author of Rhetoric and Biblical Interpretation.

Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger ponders what it means to read Heidegger on his own terms, that is, to read him from the place where one is, in Heidegger’s language, in and from the facticity of one’s own Being... To be Jewish, according to Scult, is to be entexted with Torah. Scult argues that this notion of binding one’s being with a textual tradition underlies Heidegger’s theory of Dasein. He uses Heidegger’s lectures on Aristotle’s Rhetoric to illustrate how Heidegger ‘reads Aristotle’ and, in doing so. . . teach[es] the Jew how to be-Jewish-in-the-world through an engagement with a textual tradition (Torah). .Shaul Magid, The Jewish Theological Seminary of America

“a compelling account of how being-Jewish enacts the sort of concrete, revealing relationship to a text and a world that makes meditation on being, as Heidegger - early and late - understands it, possible. Only someone with Allen Scult's trained ear for the subtle interplay of rhetoric and hermeneutics could make us see the remarkable parallels between the Rabbis' reading of the Torah and Heidegger's reading of Aristotle….he makes a trenchant case for ‘a reading of Heidegger not as prophet, but as Rabbinic sage’.”--Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Boston University

Now in paperback, this important book explores the central role of historical thought in the full range of Heidegger’s thought, both the early writings leading up to Being and Time, and after the “reversal” or Kehre that inaugurated his later work.

Barash examines Heidegger’s views on history in a richly developed context of debates that transpired in the early 20th-century German philosophy of history.

He addresses a key unifying theme—the problem of historical meaning and the search for coherent criteria of truth in an era of historical relativism—as he traces the engagement with historicity throughout all major epochs and works.

Barash revises this edition to explore new material, including Heidegger’s lecture course texts from 1910 to 1923, and adds an expanded, updated bibliography.

In this powerfully argued book, Knasas engages a debate at the heart of the revival of Thomistic thought in the twentieth century. Richly detailed and illuminating, his book calls on the tradition established by Gilson, Maritain, and Owen, to build a case for Existential Thomism as a valid metaphysics.

Being and Some Twentieth-Century Thomists is a comprehensive discussion of the major issues and controversies in neo-Thomism, including issues of mind, knowledge, the human subject, free will, nature, grace, and the act of being. Knasas also discusses the Transcendental Thomism of Maréchal, Rahner, Lonergan, and others as he builds a carefully articulated case for completing the Thomist revival.