Description
Book SynopsisRorty and the Prophetic interrogates and provides a constructive assessment to the American neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty's critiques of Jewish ethics. Rorty dismisses the public applicability of Jewish moral reasoning, because it is based on the will of God through divine revelation. As a self-described secular philosopher, it comes as no surprise that Rorty does not find public applicability within a divinely-ordered Jewish ethic. Rorty also rejects the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's ethics, which is based upon the notion of infinite responsibility to the Face of the Other. In Rorty's judgment, Levinas's ethics is gawky, awkward, and unenlightening. From a Rortyan perspective, it seems that Jewish ethics simply can't win: either it is either too dependent on the will of God or over-emphasizes the human Other. The volume responds to Rorty's criticisms of Jewish ethics in three different ways: first, demonstrating agreements between Rorty and Jewish thinkers
Table of Contents
Introduction by Jacob L: Goodson
Part 1: Social Hope and Solidarity: Bringing Jewish Philosophy and Rorty’s Neo-pragmatism Together
Chapter 1: Rorty, my Atheist Rabbi? Between Irony and Social Hope by Akiba Lerner
Chapter 2: Prudence in the Twenty-first Century: Moving Beyond the Morality-Prudence Distinction with Maimonides and Rorty by Jacob L: Goodson
Chapter 3: Charlottesville Pragmatism: Richard Rorty’s Neo-pragmatism and Peter Ochs’s Rabbinic Pragmatism by Gary Slater
Part 2: Politics and Prophecy: Finding Common Ground in Jewish Theology and Rorty’s Secular Liberalism
Chapter 4: The Grounds of Prophecy: Richard Rorty and the Hermeneutics of History by Samuel Hayim Brody
Chapter 5: Messianism as a Conversation Stopper? Ironic Utopianism and Pragmatist Jewish Politics by Elliot Ratzman
Chapter 6: How to Read Rorty as a Political Theologian: And Why We Should by Stephen Minister
Part 3: Conversation and Cruelty: Putting Rorty’s Philosophy in Conversation with Emmuel Levinas’s Jewish Ethics
Chapter 7: All in the Details: Rorty and Levinas on Language, Cruelty, and Togetherness by Megan Craig
Chapter 8: Two Faces of Heteronomy: Autonomy and Cruelty in Rorty and Levinas by Brad Elliott Stone
Chapter 9: “A Faith without Triumph”: Levinas, Rorty, and Prophetic Pragmatism by J: Aaron Simmons
Chapter 10: Rabbinic Reasoning and a Rortyan Ethic: Narrative, Pragmatism, and Solidarity by Hannah Hashkes
Conclusion: Rorty and Heidegger’s Nazism by Brad Elliott Stone
