Talmud and Philosophy: Conjunctions, Disjunctions, Continuities

Wide-ranging and astutely argued, Talmud and Philosophy examines the intersections, partitions, and mutual illuminations and problematizations of Western philosophy and the Talmud. Among many philosophers, the Talmud has been at best an idealized and remote object and, at worst, if noticed at all, an object of curiosity. The contributors to this volume collectively ignite and probe a new mode of inquiry by approaching the very question of partitions, conjunctions, and disjunctions between the Talmud and philosophy as the guiding question of their inquiry.

Rather than using the Talmud and its modes of argumentation to develop existing philosophical themes, these essays probe the question of how the Talmud as an intellectual discipline sheds new light on the unfolding of philosophy in the history of thought.

Sergey Dolgopolski is Professor in the Departments of Jewish Thought and Comparative Literature and Gordon and Gretchen Gross Professor of Jewish Thought at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, and author of Other Others: The Political After the Talmud; The Open Past: Subjectivity and Remembering in the Talmud; and What Is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement. James Adam Redfield is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theological Studies, a Fellow of the Research Institute at Saint Louis University, a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, the author of Adventures of Rabbah & Friends: The Talmud’s Strange Tales and their Readers, and the translator/editor of a collection of Yiddish stories with his introduction and notes by Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky, From a Distant Relation.