Transfinite Life

Transfinite Life
Author: Bruce Rosenstock
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2017-11-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0253030161

Oskar Goldberg was an important and controversial figure in Weimar Germany. He challenged the rising racial conception of the state and claimed that the Jewish people were on a metaphysical mission to defeat race-based statism. He attracted the attention of his contemporaries—Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Thomas Mann, and Carl Schmitt, among others—with the argument that ancient Israel's sacrificial rituals held the key to overcoming the tyranny of technology in the modern world. Bruce Rosenstock offers a sympathetic but critical philosophical portrait of Goldberg and puts him into conversation with Jewish and political figures that circulated in his cultural environment. Rosenstock reveals Goldberg as a deeply imaginative and broad-minded thinker who drew on biology, mathematics, Kabbalah, and his interests in ghost photography to account for the origin of the earth. Caricatured as a Jewish proto-fascist in his day, Goldberg's views of the tyranny of technology, biopolitics, and the "new vitalism" remain relevant to this day.

Transfinite Life

Transfinite Life
Author: Bruce Rosenstock
Publisher:
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2017
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780253029706

Oskar Goldberg was an important and controversial figure in Weimar Germany. He challenged the rising racial conception of the state and claimed that the Jewish people were on a metaphysical mission to defeat race-based statism. He attracted the attention of his contemporaries--Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Thomas Mann, and Carl Schmitt, among others--with the argument that ancient Israel's sacrificial rituals held the key to overcoming the tyranny of technology in the modern world. Bruce Rosenstock offers a sympathetic but critical philosophical portrait of Goldberg and puts him into conversation with Jewish and political figures that circulated in his cultural environment. Rosenstock reveals Goldberg as a deeply imaginative and broad-minded thinker who drew on biology, mathematics, Kabbalah, and his interests in ghost photography to account for the origin of the earth. Caricatured as a Jewish proto-fascist in his day, Goldberg's views of the tyranny of technology, biopolitics, and the "new vitalism" remain relevant to this day.

Winged Words: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, and the Life of Quotation

Winged Words: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, and the Life of Quotation
Author: Benjamin E. Sax
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2023-07-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9004680217

This is the first book to explore the role of quotation in modern Jewish thought. Weaving back and forth from Benjamin to Rosenzweig, the book searches for the recovery of concealed and lost meaning in the community of letters, sacred scripture, the collecting of books, storytelling, and the life of liturgy. It also explores how the legacy of Goethe can be used to develop new strata of religious and Jewish thought. We learn how quotation is the binding tissue that links language and thought, modernity and tradition, religion and secularism as a way of being in the world.

Introduction to Field-Being Philosophy

Introduction to Field-Being Philosophy
Author: Therese Dykeman
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2022-01-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 152757878X

This text is the first concise anthology of Lik Kuen Tong’s Field-Being philosophy. In addressing the ontology of both Eastern and Western thought, Field-Being philosophy offers a new metaphysics. Inclusively, it makes room at the table of philosophy for indigenous philosophy, and, foundationally, it rethinks the universe and the global world ontologically as “activity” and “relationality.” A comprehensive philosophy, it considers what is as movement, as well as the what of movement, and inventively adds the concept of “betweenness.” This philosophy of movement or “activity,” being future-oriented, is timely in the practical world, lending itself to the addressing of current issues such as climate change, global relations, and difference.

Living Law

Living Law
Author: Miguel Vatter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2021-01-08
Genre: Law
ISBN: 019754651X

It is often assumed that modern democratic government has a special link with Christianity or was made possible due to Christianity. As a challenge to this belief and echoing a long-held assumption in the republican tradition, Hannah Arendt once remarked that "Washington's and Napoleon's heroes were named Moses and David." In this book, Miguel Vatter reconstructs the political theology of German Jewish philosophers during the twentieth century and their attempts to bring together the Biblical teachings on politics with the Greek and Roman traditions of political philosophy. Developed alongside modern experiences with anti-Semitism, the rise of Zionism, and the return of charismatic authority in mass societies, Jewish political theology in the twentieth century advances the radical hypothesis that the messianic idea of God's Kingdom correlates with a post-sovereignty, anarchist political condition of non-domination. Importantly, Jewish philosophers combined this messianic form of democracy with the ideal of cosmopolitan constitutionalism, which is itself based on the identity of divine law and natural law. This book examines the paradoxical unity of anarchy and rule of law in the democratic political theology developed by Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt. Critical of the Christian theological underpinnings of modern representative political institutions, this group of highly original thinkers took up the banner of Philo's project to unify Greek philosophy with Judaism, and rejected the separation between faith and reason, as well as the division between Biblical revelation and pagan philosophy. The Jewish political theology they developed stands for the idea that human redemption is inseparable from the redemption of nature. Living Law offers an alternative genealogy of political theology that challenges the widespread belief that modern republican political thought is derived from Christian sources.

Esoteric Lacan

Esoteric Lacan
Author: Philipp Valentini
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2019-10-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1786609711

Jacques Lacan was fascinated with forms of the "religious" throughout his life, from monotheism, which shaped his account of the signifier, to modern occultism, as he was well acquainted with the writings of figures such as Oskar Goldberg and René Guénon. Lacan also repeatedly turned to non-European religiosities to test the limits of psychoanalytic theory. In his yearly seminars he engaged with traditions such as Kabbalah and Taoism, going beyond the Western Christian, capitalist and postcolonial setting of the French university to search for a possible outside to psychoanalysis. But such a quest ultimately recapitulates Lacan's constant awareness of the desire for a new master, and the still open question regarding the names and meanings that this desire may yield. This anthology of eleven essays, which travel from gnosticism to sufism, from afro-pessimism to post-68 ex-Maoist apocalypticism, investigates these unresolved threads that Lacan left behind. Beneath the exoteric psychoanalytic apparatus of Lacan's thought, there is an esoteric Lacan who remains unexplored.

The Dynamics of Gender and Life

The Dynamics of Gender and Life
Author: Stephen Pirie
Publisher: ProCreative Pty ltd
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2023-03-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0957853777

The central concept within the ebook “The Dynamics of Gender and Life” is the universe as a self-organizing system (SOS) wherein everything and everyone is engaged in an ongoing, dynamic, cyclical, interactive dance between unity and individuality, feminine and masculine, wave and particle, togetherness and separateness, Yin and Yang, possibility and actuality. The exploration of this interactive possibility-actuality, feminine-masculine dance yields valuable and useful insights into creativity, identity politics, personality structure, belief-systems, intuition, gender, spirituality, neuroplasticity, peak-states, health, well-being and more ... Some reviews "I liked (Stephen's) generalized summaries of what it all meant as I went along, e.g., 'We, and each part within creation, are. . . an active pivot-point, a door-way, an active, creative portal through which the creative potential and power of the quantum vacuum, the implicate order, the ground of being, flows and creates. We are the delivery vehicles and directors of where and how that energy is congealed into actuality.' Beautifully expressed. These occasional "boosts" in his explication keeps the reader in touch with the overall context of what he is saying and sustains an emotional connection with the content. All in all, a wonderful piece of work, which I earnestly hope will reach a vast multitude of readers." Professor Emeritus Frank Juszczyk Western New Mexico University More reviews at https://beliefinstitute.com/reviews

Two Roads to Wisdom?

Two Roads to Wisdom?
Author: Bo Mou
Publisher: Open Court Publishing
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2001
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780812694345

How are Chinese philosophy and analytic philosophy-two very distinct traditions-alike? In this volume, fifteen distinguished scholars compare and contrast the methodologies, finding areas in which each tradition can learn from, contribute to, and complement the other.

The Case of the Persevering Maltese

The Case of the Persevering Maltese
Author: Harry Mathews
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2003
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9781564782885

"A companion to The Human Country: New and Collected Stories, this volume contains all of Harry Mathews's nonfiction. These astonishing essays cover a wide range of literary topics, including discussion of complex musical forms and Oulipian techniques, to insightful commentaries on the works of Lewis Carroll, Raymond Roussel, Italo Calvino, Joseph McElroy, and Georges Perec. Throughout the collection Mathews examines the relationship between form and literature in a lucid, intimate voice, arguing with intelligence, grace, and humor for the importance of artifice."--Publisher's description.