The Discipline of Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought [Paperback]

Exploring the subject of Jewish philosophy as a controversial construction site of the project of modernity, this book examines the implications of the different and often conflicting notions that drive the debate on the question of what Jewish philosophy is or could be.

The idea of Jewish philosophy begs the question of philosophy as such. But Jewish philosophy does not just reflect what philosophy lacks. Rather, it challenges the project of philosophy itself.

Examining the thought of Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Hermann Cohen Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Margarete Susman, Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, and others, the book highlights how the most philosophic moments of their works are those in which specific concerns of their Jewish questions inform the rethinking of philosophys disciplinarity in principal terms.

The long overdue recognition of the modernity that informs the critical trajectories of Jewish philosophers from Spinoza and Mendelssohn to the present emancipates not just Jewish philosophy from an infelicitous pigeonhole these philosophers so pointedly sought to reject but, more important, emancipates philosophy from its false claims to universalism.

Goetschels new book is provocative, compelling, and profound. Tracing the influence of the thought of Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Susman, among others, he shows how philosophys claim to universality is necessarily undermined through its complex and troubled relation to Jewish philosophy This book dramatically and definitively refigures the distinction between Greek and Hebrew thought upon which contemporary Western philosophy rests. . . . Essential reading for anyone interested in how philosophy became what it is . . . what it still could become.Goetschel persuasively argues for Jewish philosophy as a field that does not articulate the meaning of an identity-stance, but as a mode of inquiry that shows how the practice of philosophy has not yet, anl,