Description
Book SynopsisPersons and Other Things looks closely at the Bible as a philosophical work, asking insightful questions about how to interpret the Hebrew Bible, what it means to be Jewish, and how to live a meaningful and moral life.
Trade Review“The book is full of engaging witticisms. There is hardly a paragraph in which there is not a pun or a play on words. And the book is packed with off-hand references to world literature, mythology, history, and philosophy, many of them beyond the ken of most readers. I found the style to be both challenging and at times worthy of a good laugh out loud.” -- Jerome Gellman, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev *
Reading Religion *
Table of ContentsPreface Preamble … with a loosened tie Principles 1. Bibleism and Judaism: Four and a Half Dogmas of Bible Interpretation 2. Godless the Bible’s Philosophy Isn’t 3. “Jew” as a Category Label: Philosophy on the Holocaust 4. Hero, Israel: Troy and the Torah Passages 5. “On one leg”: The Stability of Monotheism 6. “Where were you?”: The Logic of the Book of Job 7. “Let them have dominion”: The Bible and the Natural World 8. “Because … God rested”: Philosophy on the Sabbath Day 9. “In the day that you shall eat”: Do and Die People 10. Eat, Pray, Smoke: Halakhah for the Goldsteins and the Goyim 11. God Loves You, Christopher Hitchens 12. Jerry and Jewry: Ethnicity and Humanity in G.A. Cohen 13. “O God, O Montreal!”: Charles Taylor and Turbo-Charged Humanism 14. A Plea for Ontology: Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos 15. Phenomenology and Analysis: A Bridge over the Waters Epilogue: The Acts of the Philosophers Finale: “The rest is the commentary thereof” Notes Bibliography Index
