From World-Soul to Universal Organism: Maimon's Hypothesis and Schelling's Physicalization of a Platonic-Kabbalistic Concept (original) (raw)
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AN ESSAY ON KABBALISM AND PHILOSOPHY (Published in 2020)
Revista Sképsis, 2020
Abstract: This paper is based on the transcription of the lecture “Introdução aopensamento de Abraham Cohen de Herrera” (“Introduction to the thinking of AbrahamCohen de Herrera”), given at the II SinaCripto, at UFS/São Cristóvão-Brazil between the 19th and the 21st of June, 2017. Our original aim was to discuss some features of Abraham Cohen de Herrera’s Puerta del Cielo (c. 1570 – c. 1635); but, as soon as we started looking for secondary bibliography, we have noted that there are many issues surrounding, as a background, the production of Herrera’s above mentioned work. On the other hand, some of these issues – as, for example, the strict endogeny of Kabbalah, the transmission of Jewish Mystic Literature, the oblivion of Jewish philosophers in the narratives of the history of philosophy – do not concern only to Herrera’s works and life, but can be found in other instances related to the History of the Jewish Thought. So, we changed our original focus and, instead of talking only on Herrera’s work, we tried to trace back the origins and perenniality of those above mentioned issues. Keywords: History of Jewish Thought. Metahistory of Philosophy. Jewish Mysticism. Kabbalah. Abraham Cohen de Herrera.
Schelling and Kabbalah: A Parabolic Approach
The historically most elusive segment in the Schellingian erudition is perhaps its kabbalistic aspect. The only device to approach it seems to be philology, that is, tracing back the development of notions in the Schellingian oeuvre. On the other hand, in addition to this approach, it is also possible to examine the development process of the original kabbalistic ideas in question, in order to verify the legitimacy and necessity of the traditionally strict distinction between "Jewish" and "Christian" Kabbalah. This essay offers a parabolic approach as an attempt to understand the nature of Schelling's kabbalistic heritage.
Deus Sive Natura — The Metamorphosis of a Dictum from Maimonides to Spinoza
Maimonides and the Sciences
The relationship between the dissemination of Maimonidean thought and the emergence of Jewish mysticism still requires clarification in order to understand more fully some of the major processes in the religious and intellectual history of Judaism. In the period following the death of Maimonides, two main interpretations of Judaism surfaced exactly at the same time and competed with each other in a conspicuous way, each of them claiming to represent the correct interpretation of Judaism.! Though this competition is a crucial fact in the development of Jewish speculative literature, there is no doubt that the Kabbalists learned a lot not only from the halakhic opus of Maimonides, but also from his other works and indeed profited from a variety of themes treated by "the great eagle.,,2 Here we are concerned only with the influence of Maimonides' view of nature on Kabbalah. We will be primarily concerned with tracing the developments within certain kabbalistic circles of Maimonides' understanding of the relationship between the natural and the divine. However, before addressing our main theme, let me briefly comment on the reverberation of an interesting Maimonidean concept on Kabbalah: his view regarding the constant miracles. Cursorily presented in his Treatise on Resureclion, 3 the conception of a natural order that conforms to the biblical requirements concerning human behaviour had a long and far reaching career in a series of Kabbalistic texts, starting with Nahmanides' writings. 4 Though similar views can be detected also in the writing of Jewish thinkers preceding Maimonides,5 Nahmanides quotes him alone when elaborating on the view of hidden miracles. The basic assumption of the existence of an underlying process that is occult by definition and is therefore invisible to the contemplator of natural processes, struck a sensible chord in the Kabbalistic view of reality. However, far from becoming occasionalists, in the sense of the Mutakallimun,6 the Kabbalists used Maimonides' view concerning hidden miracles in order to propose another level of processes which regulate nature. The biblical conception of the interrelation of human behaviour and natural processes did not satisfy the religious interest that dictates now the way of understanding the
Tzahi Weiss, "Beyond the Scope of Philosophy and Kabbalah", Religions 12(3):160 (2021)
Religions , 2021
The turn of the thirteenth century is a formative period for the historiography of medieval Jewish thought. These years saw the dissemination of the Hebrew translations of the Maimonidean corpus, alongside the simultaneous appearance of the first Kabbalistic treatises, in the same geographical regions. This concurrent appearance led scholars to examine Jewish theological discourse mainly via two juxtaposed categories: "Philosophy" and "Kabbalah". In this paper, I will return to that formative moment in order to demonstrate that exploring Jewish history of ideas beyond the scope of these categories could be very advantageous in improving our understanding of both categories and the Jewish theological inner-dynamics in this period as a whole. I will draw attention to a contemporary theological attitude, which is neither Kabbalistic nor philosophical, which I will define as a medieval form of Jewish binitarianism. My argument in this paper will be composed of two parts-first, outlining the nature of this medieval Jewish theological trend, and second, showing how a precise definition of this belief within its context alters crucial notions and understandings in the common scholarly historiography of medieval Jewish thought.
Entanglement, Agency and Phenomena. Quantum Physics and Philosophy after Schelling
Rivista di estetica
The topic of this essay concerns the interest that the conception of nature in Schelling has aroused in the philosophical culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I propose to examine the retrieval of the philosophy of the nature of Schelling from the history of philosophy and history of science standpoints. Therefore, my paper will be divided into three parts. In particular, I will start by examining the state of the art on the reevaluation of Schelling in the context of the contemporary philosophy of science; then I will pass by analyzing the relationship between Schelling's thought and the quantum physics according to Slavoj Žižek and Karen Barad approach; finally, I will conclude by going back to the Kantian source of this branch of study. This past criticism made by Schelling seems applicable also to the present. Now, as then. We will see afterwards whether this assumption is true. Thanks to Grant and other scholars of Schelling, there is a veritable resurrection or resurgence of the Schelling's philosophy of nature, which can indeed be intended as a means to pacify these philosophies with a concern for nature. We must recognize that, until a few decades ago, Schelling's Naturphilosophie did not enjoy a good reputation at least in philosophy of science. According to Andrew Bowie, by the 1840s the natural sciences imbued with materialism and positivism killed off Naturphilosophie «as part of the overt praxis of modern science». 2 Many natural scientists dismissed Schelling's speculative physics since they perceived it to be «a lack of respect for the empirical facts». 3 Therefore, Schelling's theory of nature had no chance to survive, since it was increasingly viewed as having obstructed or retarded scientific inquiry. Actually, the story of a bad relationship between Schelling and science has more ancient and deep roots. As a matter of fact, already even in the first half of the nineteenth century Justus von Liebig, father of the organic chemistry, conceived Naturphilosophy as «the insane sister» of true philosophy. He compared its extravagances with the «pestilence and the Black Death of the century». 4 Liebig got rid of Schelling with a trenchant opinion: «Schelling possessed no thorough knowledge in the province of the natural sciences, and the dressing up of natural phenomena with analogies and images which was called exposition, did not suit me». 5 According to this line of thinking, in 1844, the botanist Matthias Jakob Schleiden, co-inspirator along with Theodor Schwann of the future cell theory formulated by Rudolf Virchow, had strongly criticized Schelling's conception of nature as a vivid example of philosophical aberration: Schelling und die Naturwissenschaft wissen nämlich gegenseitig gar nichts von einander und können sich deshalb auch nicht streiten […] Man glaube ja nicht, dass ich hier eine Arbeit eines chemischen Anfängers excerpire, worin ganz einfach chemische Unwissenheit als absoluter Unsinn sich darstellt. Hier ist von Erfahrungswissenschaft nicht die Rede, es ist Philosophie, die uns die Thatsache a priori construirt (Schleiden 1844: 30 and 33) These attacks were even more vehement by the physicists of the time. Hermann von Helmholtz, co-founder with Emil du Bois-Reymond and Carl Ludwig of the so-called "physicalist school in physiology", rejected all metaphysical prin-2 Bowie 1993: 4.
in "Quaestio", 8 (2008), pp. 219-277., 2008
This essay examines the positions of Scotus and a number of Scotists on the nature of metaphysics and its object. According to the mature Scotus, metaphysics is possible as a science distinct both from physics and from revealed theology thanks to a capability and a limitation. The capability is expressed by Scotus in two ways. Firstly: the ratio of being that is included in everything can be abstracted from it; in particular, this ratio can be abstracted from sensible things. Secondly: in reality, metaphysics is a “transcendentology”, which deals both with absolute transcendentals (first of all with the ratio of being) and with disjunctive ones (moreover, considering separately each of their two parts). In particular, metaphysics has to deal with the proper characteristics of the two parts of the disjunctive transcendental “infinite being / finite being”. The limitation posed by Scotus is twofold. First of all, in the present state the human intellect (and, as a consequence, human metaphysics) cannot grasp the proper characteristics of the infinite being. Secondly, in any case the couple “immobile being / mobile being” is not a disjunctive transcendental, so that metaphysics cannot study the proper characteristics of the immobile being. Thanks to these tenets, Scotus advocates a conception of metaphysics as a unitary science dealing both with rationes generalissimae, and – but only to some extent – spiritual substances, nevertheless he binds together these two parts of this science in a way which is intrinsically complex and (due to the fact that one of his works, the De cognitione Dei, failed to circulate) not even fully known by his followers. In this essay I argue that Scotus’ followers solved the “open problems” posed by the theory and the texts of their master by developing divergent strategies. Francis of Marchia and Bonet removed all sorts of asymmetry inside metaphysics between the study of material substances and the study of spiritual substances, but separated the science of transcendental rationes from the science of spiritual beings. By contrast, Andrés, Zerbi and Trombetta combined into a single science the science of tran¬scendental rationes and the science of spiritual beings, but emphasized that metaphysics deals with spiritual substances more in detail than it does with the material ones. In particular, the position of the Scotist Trombetta diverges from the position of his ideal master on an essential point. According to Scotus, the distinction between metaphysics and physics lies in the simple and immediate abstractability of being from what is sensible. This abstractibility is such that the comprehension of being, considered as a unitary and intelligible ratio, does not change during the entire development of metaphysics. By contrast, for Trombetta, the distinction between metaphysics and physics lies in the cognizance that spiritual beings can occur. This cognizance is the result of the demonstration of the existence of spiritual beings.
HIST 388: Kabbalah: Science, Religion and Nature in Western History
What is kabbalah? Most literally, it is a Hebrew word meaning "tradition." Yet this tradition was one shared and shaped by Jews, Muslims and Christians alike, who sought to look forward by looking back. It was no mere conservative form of Religion, as the term might imply to us moderns, but also cutting-edge Science. As such, kabbalah inspired some of the most celebrated thinkers of the premodern West-including the heroes of the Renaissance and the so-called Scientific Revolution-to read the world as a second, mathematical scripture. Galileo may have told the western European world that the universe is written in the language of mathematics. But his Muslim and Jewish forbears knew that hundreds of years before Galileo ever gazed through a Dutch telescope into the Tuscan skies. While inherently Western, however, kabbalist cosmology is fundamentally at odds with modern scientistic materialism: God is a verb, not a noun; the universe is alive, rather than filled with dead matter; not only humans and animals have souls, and hence language-plants and minerals do, too; all these souls reincarnate within cyclical time; letters and numbers underlie everything we see around us; mind and body are two sides of the same coin; magic (aka psychophysics) simply works. In this course, we will investigate the historical branchings and cosmological implications of kabbalah as a mainstream Helleno-Judeo-Islamo-Christian system of thought-one that sur-Kabbalah: