Papers by Paul Nahme
Unsettling Jewish Knowledge: Text, Contingency, Desire, 2023
The Future of Jewish Philosophy
In this study of the nineteenth-century German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen, I argue that Coh... more In this study of the nineteenth-century German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen, I argue that Cohen’s revision of Kantian ethics and moral theology is permeated with concepts drawn from and logically contoured by his interpretation of Maimonidean rationalism and Jewish sources, more generally. Through an idealizing hermeneutic, Cohen normativizes certain philosophical problems in post-Kantian philosophy and addresses them under the title of "pantheism" and "positivism". Between both pantheism and positivism, Cohen’s idealism presents a middle path, which I describe as "prophetic idealism", or a philosophy of time and ideality that interprets history, law, and ethical normativity as future-oriented. In other words, "prophecy" intimates a methodological role for temporality in practical philosophy and introduces a new meaning for legality in ethics. Cohen therefore offers a philosophy of Judaism, as a philosophy of religion, by normativizing the...
The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, 2018
This article reinterprets Maimonides’ theory of creation and revelation by focusing upon the rela... more This article reinterprets Maimonides’ theory of creation and revelation by focusing upon the relationship between belief in creation and the affirmation of miracle and law described in Guide II :25. Focusing upon Maimonides’ use of inference to describe creation and revelation, I re-evaluate Maimonides’ account as an instance of inferential reasoning. That is, Maimonides makes use of, rather than proves, the implicit norms of creation and revelation in their explicit function of legal reasoning. Thus, I suggest that Maimonides’ emphasis upon inferential judgment in justifying law is a defense of creation and revelation as rules of reasoning.
Modern Theology, 2016
Liberalism has yet again reached a breaking point. With the crack in the foundations of the Europ... more Liberalism has yet again reached a breaking point. With the crack in the foundations of the European supra-national project decisively rent wider apart with the British exit of the EU, the rise of a populism nurtured by myth-mongering and nostalgic demagogy in America, and the ever-increasing appeal to identitarian essentialisms gripping the global population, there is good reason to draw conclusions about the zenith of liberalism. This is because liberalism, for better or worse, represents an attempt to stymie unreflective assertions of fact and value with an appeal to consciousness: about where and how values came from and to be. Thus, for the purposes of this article, I primarily understand liberalism as a worldview linked specifically to the inheritance of Enlightenment citizen-subjectivity and its identification with a self-reflexive epistemological agency as the basis for modern identity. While the liberal political tradition has its valleys and peaks, its underlying hermeneutic has been characterized by scholars as one of self-legitimation and selfassertion. 1 But liberalism has many faces, and its hermeneutic worldview is as important as are its political manifestations. Beyond political doctrine, "liberalism's" synonymy with "modernity" has also informed characterizations of nineteenth-century liberal theology-both Protestant and Jewish-in the pursuit of the scientific ideal underlying the quest to understand the essence of religious experience. It was this version of liberalism-of a relativizing historicism and a self-assertion of values-that catalyzed the years of crisis gripping German theology of the 1920s, in which thinkers like Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, and a young Leo Strauss rebelled against a generally humanist and historicist
Oxford Bibliographies Online Datasets
Political Theology, 2013
This article takes it cue from the debate between Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson regarding the po... more This article takes it cue from the debate between Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson regarding the possibility of political theology within Christianity, and in response, offers a conceptual-historical portrait of sovereignty and its juridical dimensions. Beginning with the introduction of Roman law into the medieval Church, the article traces the logic of "legal principle" as the basis of sovereign decision and how the form of legal distinctions adopted into canon law translate the Romanitas of law into the theory of papal sovereignty. By the Romanitas of law, that is to say the principle of sovereignty in law. The article then seeks to describe the conceptual translations of Roman politics and Stoic metaphysics into theological form and the logic of this translation into medieval natural law. The article concludes by evaluating how the civic theology of Rome is conceptually inherited by the politics and legal framework of sovereignty and returns to Peterson's critique of Schmitt, arguing that political theology can be understood as a dynamic where politics is theologized, assuming that in the history of religion, theology and politics are never fully distinct to begin with.
Philosophy East and West, 2012
Confucian scholarship. Bringing the classical Confucian texts into dialogue with Rorty's neo-prag... more Confucian scholarship. Bringing the classical Confucian texts into dialogue with Rorty's neo-pragmatism allows them to be read with new meaning, makes more striking what is absent from their discourse, and illustrates problems in Rorty's approach-particularly the relation between self and community. But the volume also does something else. It makes the reader confront the fact that, on a wide range of fundamental interpretive issues-such as the nature of religiousness and the tension between tradition and innovation-there are striking and deep disagreements within contemporary Confucian scholarship. In a conventionalist approach to truth, this might be a disquieting state of affairs. Yet Rorty would presumably be delighted if his work has helped to bring out such disagreements. After all, for Rorty, "[w]ithout such specialists in dissonance-people who think that e verything is getting too damned harmonious-intellectual and moral progress would slow to a halt" (p. 295). From the "eruption of novelty" found in this volume, better ways of describing ourselves might arise.
Harvard Theological Review, 2017
The study of Judaism within the modern university would not be possible without the legacy as wel... more The study of Judaism within the modern university would not be possible without the legacy as well as the methodological approach of the small group of young scholars and students in Berlin who founded theVerein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Judenin 1819. Although outside the walls of the German university, these scholars endeavored to make inroads within the discipline ofOrientalistikwhile standing firm in their hope that the Hegelian spirit of the day might give Judaism its determinate recognition in the light of Absolute Spirit and give the Jews their citizenship.
There is perhaps no genre of storytelling as easy to recognize as that of the ghost story. That's... more There is perhaps no genre of storytelling as easy to recognize as that of the ghost story. That's because ghost stories affect us; they startle, scare, and shock; they pull us into worlds that feel familiar although we believe them not to be our own. Though not exclusively modern creations, ghost stories are recognizable to modern aesthetic sensibilities because they traffic in elisions between body and spirit, between sensation and imperceptibility, between time and space, between being and affect. And to the extent that the line between knowledge and feeling, certainty and terror, anxiety and calm is blurred as well, the genre of the ghost story represents a range of affects governed by a particularly modern, disenchanted regime of knowledge. That is to say, as an extension of the gothic sensibility of the fin de siècle more generally, 1 the ghost story presupposes the modern epistemic norms that dictate that the real is material and manifest while the fictive is illusory or only apparent. 2 It is the hegemony of this regime of knowledge * I am grateful for the comments and feedback I received on an early draft of this article, which I presented in a number of different workshops. Colleagues in Harvard University's Center for Judaic Studies Starr Fellowship were the first to read this piece, and their comments and feedback were indispensable at that early stage. I'm grateful for conversations with Francesca Bregoli, Derek Penslar, Orit Rozin, and Joshua Teplitsky that helped me clarify some of my historical and theoretical interventions. Feedback from Samuel Hayim Brody, Andrea Dara Cooper, Rachel Gordon, Susannah Heschel, Sarah Imhoff, and Elias Sacks pushed me to think more broadly about the theoretical stakes of my argument. I am also thankful to my colleagues in Judaic Studies at Brown University, whose comments helped me in my final revisions of the piece. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay generously read and commented on a draft, and Andre Willis has been a constant interlocutor. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers whose suggestions helped me streamline and clarify my argument. All errors and oversights are of course mine alone.
SINCE ITS INCEPTION IN 189 6, the pages of the prestigious philosophical journal Kant-Studien hav... more SINCE ITS INCEPTION IN 189 6, the pages of the prestigious philosophical journal Kant-Studien have hardly been free from controversy. Nevertheless, one especially striking event stands out not only for its departure from the standard debates in Kant scholarship but also for marking a decisive shift in a debate about who might legitimately claim to interpret Kant or German philosophy as such. In 1917, at the height of World War I, the neo-Kantian philosopher Bruno Bauch published two essays in volume 21 of the journal. Of the two, the essay titled "Vom Begriff der Nation" (On the concept of the nation) seemed to depart from the young thinker's usual focus on neo-Kantian themes of natural and cultural science to more or less indict the editorial board of the journal, if not the German philosophical establishment as a whole, for complicity in corroding the national spirit of philosophy. The target of Bauch's attack, however, was not explicit. Indeed, the thrust of his argument was conceptual, taking aim at a critical definition of the "nation"; it was his method-and a few candid remarks about the Jews as foreigners-that revealed his true aim, namely, to introduce a growing anxiety among völkisch antisemites into academic philosophy and thus to first identify and then undermine definitively a certain "Jewish" interpretation of Kant. Bauch's essay exploited elements of established philosophical discourse to address these concerns and to place the identity of "German" philosophy in question explicitly. Wary of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, a school associated with many German Jewish thinkersespecially one of its main founders, Hermann Cohen and his student Ernst Cassirer-and their focus on purportedly "neutral" logical and scientific epistemology, Bauch therefore chose Kantianism and the journal representing the Kant society of Germany as the venue for his argument
The study of Judaism within the modern university would not be possible without the legacy as wel... more The study of Judaism within the modern university would not be possible without the legacy as well as the methodological approach of the small group of young scholars and students in Berlin who founded the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden in 1819. Although outside the walls of the German university, these scholars endeavored to make inroads within the discipline of Orientalistik while standing firm in their hope that the Hegelian spirit of the day might give Judaism its determinate recognition in the light of Absolute Spirit and give the Jews their citizenship. 1 The methodological focus of the Wissenschaft des Judentums aimed at legitimating and justifying Judaism in modernity. For scholars such as Leopold Zunz, the greatest symbol of modernity was the general nineteenth-century German * This article benefitted from conversations with Nathaniel Berman, Elias Sacks, Elliot Salinger, and Eliyahu Stern, as well as from comments and responses from Perry Dane and members of the Cambridge Project in Jewish Thought, members of the Judaic Studies Faculty Colloquium at Brown University, as well as from the helpful suggestions of an anonymous reviewer. Many thanks to Yonatan Brafman for conversations that generated the title of the article. All errors and shortcomings are mine alone. 1 Founding members of the Verein such as Moses Moser and Eduard Gans were students of Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of history in Berlin.
This article reinterprets Maimonides' theory of creation and revelation by focusing upon the rela... more This article reinterprets Maimonides' theory of creation and revelation by focusing upon the relationship between belief in creation and the affirmation of miracle and law described in Guide ii:25. Focusing upon Maimonides' use of inference to describe creation and revelation, I re-evaluate Maimonides' account as an instance of inferential reasoning. That is, Maimonides makes use of, rather than proves, the implicit norms of creation and revelation in their explicit function of legal reasoning. Thus, I suggest that Maimonides' emphasis upon inferential judgment in justifying law is a defense of creation and revelation as rules of reasoning.
Liberalism has yet again reached a breaking point. With the crack in the foundations of the Europ... more Liberalism has yet again reached a breaking point. With the crack in the foundations of the European supra-national project decisively rent wider apart with the British exit of the EU, the rise of a populism nurtured by myth-mongering and nostalgic demagogy in America, and the ever-increasing appeal to identitarian essentialisms gripping the global population, there is good reason to draw conclusions about the zenith of liberalism. This is because liberalism, for better or worse, represents an attempt to stymie unreflective assertions of fact and value with an appeal to consciousness: about where and how values came from and to be. Thus, for the purposes of this article, I primarily understand liberalism as a worldview linked specifically to the inheritance of Enlightenment citizen-subjectivity and its identification with a self-reflexive epistemological agency as the basis for modern identity. While the liberal political tradition has its valleys and peaks, its underlying hermeneutic has been characterized by scholars as one of self-legitimation and selfassertion. 1 But liberalism has many faces, and its hermeneutic worldview is as important as are its political manifestations. Beyond political doctrine, "liberalism's" synonymy with "modernity" has also informed characterizations of nineteenth-century liberal theology-both Protestant and Jewish-in the pursuit of the scientific ideal underlying the quest to understand the essence of religious experience. It was this version of liberalism-of a relativizing historicism and a self-assertion of values-that catalyzed the years of crisis gripping German theology of the 1920s, in which thinkers like Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, and a young Leo Strauss rebelled against a generally humanist and historicist
This article takes it cue from the debate between Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson regarding the po... more This article takes it cue from the debate between Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson regarding the possibility of political theology within Christianity, and in response, offers a conceptual-historical portrait of sovereignty and its juridical dimensions. Beginning with the introduction of Roman law into the medieval Church, the article traces the logic of "legal principle" as the basis of sovereign decision and how the form of legal distinctions adopted into canon law translate the Romanitas of law into the theory of papal sovereignty. By the Romanitas of law, that is to say the principle of sovereignty in law. The article then seeks to describe the conceptual translations of Roman politics and Stoic metaphysics into theological form and the logic of this translation into medieval natural law. The article concludes by evaluating how the civic theology of Rome is conceptually inherited by the politics and legal framework of sovereignty and returns to Peterson's critique of Schmitt, arguing that political theology can be understood as a dynamic where politics is theologized, assuming that in the history of religion, theology and politics are never fully distinct to begin with.
Book Reviews by Paul Nahme
Philosophy East and West, 2012
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Papers by Paul Nahme
Book Reviews by Paul Nahme