The Principles of Judaism

Samuel Lebens takes the three principles of Jewish faith, as proposed by Rabbi Joseph Albo (1380-1444), in order to scrutinize and refine them with the toolkit of contemporary analytic philosophy. What could it mean for a perfect being to create a world from nothing? Could our world be anything more than a figment of God’s imagination? What is the Torah? What does Judaism expect from a Messiah, and what would it mean for a world to be redeemed? These questions are explored in conversation with a wide array of Jewish sources and with an eye towards diverse fields of contemporary research, such as cosmology, philosophical logic, the ontology of literature, and the metaphysics of time. The Principles of Judaism articulates the most fundamental axioms of Orthodox Judaism in the vernacular of contemporary philosophy.

Samuel Lebens, Research Fellow, Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa

Samuel Lebens is Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Haifa. His research interests focus on the history of early analytic philosophy, the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and the philosophy of religion. Having received his PhD from Birkbeck College, London, Lebens held post-docs at the University of Notre Dame, and Rutgers University before taking up his current position at the University of Haifa. Lebens is also an ordained Orthodox Rabbi and the chairperson and co-founder of the Association for the Philosophy of Judaism. His publications include Jewish Philosophy in an Analytic Age (co-edited with Dani Rabinowitz and and Aaron Segal; 2019) and Bertrand Russell and the Nature of Propositions: A History and Defence of the Multiple Relation Theory of Judgement (2017).