Philosophy of Religion

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik was one of the most important philosophers of Judaism in the twentieth century. Among his many books, essays and lectures, we find a detailed engagement with the Bible, the Talmud and the fundamental works of Maimonides. This course will examine Soloveitchik's philosophical readings and appropriation of Torah, Talmud, and both the Guide and the Mishneh Torah. A framing question of the course will be: how can one combine traditional Jewish learning and modern philosophical ideas? What can Judaism gain from philosophy? What can philosophy learn from Judaism?

The quarrel between reason and faith has a long history. The birth of Christianity was in the crucible of rationality. The ancient Greeks privileged this human capacity above all others, finding in reason the quality wherein man was closest to the gods, while the early Christians found this viewpoint antithetical to religious humility. As religion and its place in society have evolved throughout history, so have the standing of, and philosophical justification for, non-belief on rational grounds. This course will examine the intellectual and cultural history of arguments against religion in Western thought from antiquity to the present. Along the way, of course, we will also examine the assumptions bound up in the binary terms "religion" and "reason."

The quarrel between reason and faith has a long history. The birth of Christianity was in the crucible of rationality. The ancient Greeks privileged this human capacity above all others, finding in reason the quality wherein man was closest to the gods, while the early Christians found this viewpoint antithetical to religious humility. As religion and its place in society have evolved throughout history, so have the standing of, and philosophical justification for, non-belief on rational grounds. This course will examine the intellectual and cultural history of arguments against religion in Western thought from antiquity to the present. Along the way, of course, we will also examine the assumptions bound up in the binary terms "religion" and "reason."

Seventeenth-century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza was expelled from his Jewish community at the age of twenty-three, and has been publicly reviled for much of the last 350 years. But how could a philosopher—let alone one who is famous, more than anything else, for his metaphysics—provoke such a visceral reaction? In this course, we’ll examine many of Spinoza’s metaphysical doctrines which caused such controversy, as well as their impact on our understanding of religion and human nature. Topics to be discussed include: revelation and miracles as natural events; pantheism; substance monism; necessitarianism; mind and body as “one and the same thing”; and teleology.

“Epicurus's old questions are yet unanswered. Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?” This course will consider the challenge posed by the existence of evil to the rationality of traditional theistic belief. Drawing on both classic and contemporary readings, we will discuss atheistic arguments from evil in both “logical” and “evidential” forms. We will analyze attempts by theistic philosophers to construct “theodicies” and “defenses” in response to these arguments, including the “free-will defense” and “soul-making theodicies.” We will also consider critiques of such theodicies as philosophically confused, morally depraved, or both; and we will discuss the problems of divinely commanded or enacted evil and of divine hiddenness.

Does Judaism recognize an ethics independent of Halakhah (Jewish law)? What are the interrelations, conceptually and normatively, between ethics and Halakhah? How should we understand the conflicts between ethics and Halakhah, morality and religion? How does the Jewish tradition conceive of the notion of mitzvah (commandment), and what is the relationship between interpersonal mitzvot and mitzvot between human beings and God? What are the modes of Halakhic reasoning distinct from ethical argumentation? These topics will be considered through a study of the work of Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Aharon Lichtenstein, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, David Weiss Halivni, Daniel Sperber, and Emmanuel Lévinas. Specific examples to be discussed may include the status of women, prayer, and repentance.

This course continues the development of a new analytical and phenomenological approach to the relationship between revelation and reason (revelatio et ratio), between theology and philosophy, as they are constructed in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought, and in close relationship to their patristic precursors.  Specific themes to be engaged include: relevation as paradox ; the different forms of knowledge implied in ratio (with discussion of Scheleiermacher, Hegel, Spinoza, Kant and Fichte); and the role of the Trinity between relevation and reason (with particular attention to Basil and Augustine, as well as Hegel, Schelling and von Balthasar). (II)

Are our moral and religious values eternal and unchanging or were they shaped by contingent historical events in the distant past? If the latter is the case, did these events leave traces in our psychology in a manner which is not immediately obvious and accessible to us, but which could nevertheless become accessible? What would be the implications of such historical and psychological influences for our moral and religious values: might we need to reassess, and perhaps radically alter, all or some of our moral and religious beliefs? In this course we will discuss Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Sigmund Freud’s original answers to these questions. In the first part of the course, we will examine Nietzsche’s project of criticizing morality and religion, especially via a close reading of his Genealogy of Morals. We will discuss such themes as his genealogical account of Christian morality, the development and moralization of our conscience through religion, and will to power and the nature of truth. We will also consider broader explanatory and normative issues, such the scope and ambitions of Nietzsche’s critique of morality and its meta-ethical implications. In the second part of the course, we will read most of Freud’s cultural texts, such as Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and Moses and Monotheism, and discuss his genealogical accounts of morality and religion and their complex relations to human psychology. Throughout our discussion, we will be concerned with Freud’s notion of the unconscious and models of the psyche, as well as with the transition from individual to group psychology. Finally, we will also critically assess the status and plausibility of Nietzsche’s and Freud’s respective accounts: are these two philosophers telling us factual historical stories, mere psychological stories, or a combination of both? In order to answer these questions we will read works by leading philosophers and psychoanalysts, as well as passages from Scripture.

This course will focus on authors from the Jewish tradition, although some attention will be given to Catholic and Protestant perspectives, as found, for example, in liberation theology and in certain forms of religious existentialism. We will look at the various ways in which contemporary philosophers of Judaism have dealt with suffering, evil and God, especially after the experience of the Shoah. We will examine the often repeated claim that Judaism has approached the philosophical and religious challenges of suffering more through an ethics of suffering than on the basis of a metaphysics of suffering. After an introductory discussion of Maimonides on the Book of Job, readings for the course may come from authors such as E. Lévinas, J.B. Soloveitchik, Y. Leibowitz, H. Jonas, A. Lichtenstein, D.W. Halivni, D. Shatz, and E. Berkovits. The course will culminate in a philosophical analysis of some of the most important writings of Primo Levi.