Papers by Phillip Stambovsky
unpublished
This essay offers two philosophically pregnant notions as original contributions to Jewish Studie... more This essay offers two philosophically pregnant notions as original contributions to Jewish Studies, Philosophy of Judaism, and Religious Studies: 1) ‘Sacral attunement,’ understood as the devotional inflection intrinsic to religious thinking; 2) ‘Hiersein’, ‘Being-here’, taken as the existential correlate of the Abrahamic ‘Hēnaynee’ (הנני) of the Akedah and Moses’ ‘Hēnaynee’ at the Burning Bush, regarded as founding speech acts of the Abrahamic and Mosaic prophetic tradition. Section I considers the sacred as it figures in ‘sacral attunement’, critically engaging Menachem Kellner’s Maimonidean account of it. Section II elucidates the attunement proper to Jewish devotional mindfulness, this in light of Heidegger’s existential ontology of ‘fundamental attunement’. Applying, emending, and transcending the Heideggerian onto- epistemology of attunement, section III probes how the sacral attunement ‘awakened’ by the halakhically normative, yet freely self-legislated, covenantal performance of the commandments is linked to Hiersein in ways unique to the existential dimension of Jewish devotional thinking.
This groundbreaking neo-Maimonidean work establishes, on independently philosophical grounds, the... more This groundbreaking neo-Maimonidean work establishes, on independently philosophical grounds, the intellectual warrant of Jewish religious thinking as “devotional intelligence.” It demonstrates the purchase and intellectual authority of such thinking by appeal to two dialectically interrelated principles: on the one hand, the metaphysical principle that knowing is of being; and, on the other, “sacral attunement,” a normative principle. Part I distinguishes this study from leading work in contemporary philosophy of Judaism. It introduces the game-changing bid to privilege “intelligence” in the onto-epistemological Aristotelian sense, over epistemologically orchestrated, post-Enlightenment “reason” when it comes to assessing the intellectual soundness of religious thinking. Part II distills contemporary elements of Aristotle’s onto-epistemological psychology of intelligence that Maimonides incorporated in his philosophy of Jewish religious thinking. Further, it finds in Hegel a bridge between Maimonides’ account of devotional intelligence and a modern Maimonidean “science of knowing” dedicated to religious thinking. Part III turns to “sacral attunement,” foregrounding the normative “devotional” aspect of devotional intelligence. It probes the intentionality of both onto-epistemological attunement and the “sacred” relative to “the factor of the transcendent.” In the process it identifies and applies elements of an existential phenomenology of “fundamental attunement” that thematize defining realities of the sacral attunement unique to normative Jewish covenantal praxis. A related analysis of “the sacred” in religious thinking follows, which segues to a chapter on the “factor of the transcendent” as a seminal constituent of meaning in both the sciences and religion. Part IV applies and amplifies key findings in light of a signature Jewish devotional theme: the divine names, approached from a signally Maimonidean, apophatic position indexed to the factor of the transcendent as the “unconditioned condition” (Kant) of intelligible meaning as such. Distinguishing what the divine names indicate from what they refer to, the essay concludes by substantiating the intellectual warrant of Jewish religious thinking as a devotional intelligence of the relation—of identity-in-difference—between the attributive names and the Tetragrammaton.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/philosophy-books/1042/thumbnail.jp
<jats:p>With its focus on the pathos of permanence versus temporality as human aporia and o... more <jats:p>With its focus on the pathos of permanence versus temporality as human aporia and on the function — the Werksein — of the work of art genuinely encountered, John Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn is a particularly compelling subject for philosophical analysis. The major explications of this most contentiously debated ode in the language have largely focused, however, on various combinations of the poem's stylistic, structural, linguistic, psychological, aesthetic, historical, symbolic, and intellectual-biographical elements. My paper articulates a bona fide philosophical approach to the ode's famously controversial fifth stanza (the one containing the Urn's declaration: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"). I demonstrate how William Desmond's metaphysics of Being-specifically his analysis of the univocal, equivocal, dialectical, and metaxological senses of being-affords the groundwork for a "hermeneutics of the between" that elucidates the ode's culminating stanza with all of the cogency and nuance that one would expect to derive from a systematic ontology.</jats:p>
Columbia University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2004
Columbia University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2004
Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society, 2006
The study analyzed the structure and level of investment expenditure incurred in support of local... more The study analyzed the structure and level of investment expenditure incurred in support of local government funding from the European Union (EU). It focuses on making comparisons of investment expenditure of urban-rural (22 units) and rural (171 units), Lubelskie voivodeship. The subject of analysis was also activity in obtaining EU funding of urban-rural and rural areas in the 2007-2013 programming period. The investigation period was including year 2015 which ends the possibility of spending the assistance in the programming period 2007-2013. It also shows the degree and areas obtained support of investment activities of communes by assistance funds.
Review of Metaphysics, 2017
ROCKMORE, Tom. German Idealism as Constructivism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.... more ROCKMORE, Tom. German Idealism as Constructivism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. x + 203 pp. Cloth, $45.00--The jacket copy bills this volume as Tom Rockmore's "definitive statement on the debate about German idealism between proponents of representationalism and those of constructivism." It marks the culmination of Rockmore's efforts over the years (till now little credited in the literature) to persuade students of German idealism that "the philosophical tradition that includes iconic thinkers such as Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel" is a tradition "best understood as a constructivist project." More than of merely historical significance, this project is, in Rockmore's view, the enduring "legacy of German idealism," which "lives on through cognitive constructivism" in widely diffuse forms across a variety of disciplines. Constructivism is Rockmore's term of art--"not a theory but a cognitive...
"CONSIDERED OBJECTIVELY, there can be only one human reason, there ... can be only one true ... more "CONSIDERED OBJECTIVELY, there can be only one human reason, there ... can be only one true system of philosophy from principles, in however many different and even conflicting ways one has philosophized about one and the same proposition"--so declares Kant in the Vorrede to the "Doctrine of Right." (1) Kant makes this observation in the process of framing a striking claim: "prior to the development of critical philosophy there had been no philosophy at all." (2) Eckart Forster adduces this claim as a point of departure for undertaking "to grasp and understand the single thought" that orients his ambitious new study, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction. (3) It is thus with reference to Kant's pronouncement that Forster propounds his book's lead thought, or at least the first part of it: "philosophy begins in 1781 and ends in 1806," in the sense that over those twenty-five years "philosophy became a science, thereby also arriving at knowledge of itself." (4) Forster sets himself the task of elucidating the "internal dynamic" of the "fundamental idea" that informs the philosophical-historical thesis to which he keys his investigation. (5) The fundamental idea in question is the classic speculative problematic of objective knowledge, which in the Kantian context of Forster's study takes the form of the issue of how it is that we know (discursively, intuitively) "the supersensible substrate of appearances." Beyond simply anatomizing this issue, however, the author engages "to reproduce its immanent development," systematically "reconstructing" it through interlinked analyses of seminal writings of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Goethe, and Hegel. (6) Forster divides the body of his exposition into two parts, each consisting of seven chapters. His detailed discussions of Kant (Part I) and of Fichte, Schelling, Goethe, and Hegel (all four in Part II) are exceptionally lucid and they uniformly adhere to the development of the book's defining theme. A thirteen page prologue, titled "A Beginning of Philosophy," and a briefer epilogue, "An End of Philosophy," frame the body of the study. The former systematically introduces F6rster's extended treatment of Kant. The epilogue helpfully provides a synoptic review of each phase of Forster's penetrating exposition. It also features a trenchant defense of the often summarily rejected transitions in Hegel's "science of the experience of consciousness" (the culminating theme of Part II), a defense, by extension, of "the introduction to the standpoint of science." (7) The latter marks the putative "end" of philosophy. (8) Kant's statement about the beginning of philosophy, on the other hand, if isolated from its context in the paragraph in which Kant placed it, (9) would hardly pass muster with any serious student of Plato or Aristotle, or of Heidegger, Wittgenstein or, more recently, Lorenz Puntel. The remark of Kant that appears at the head of the present essay accompanies his historical pronouncement in the same paragraph, and it suggests that without due qualification one can hardly understand what at first sight must seem a presumptuous claim about the inauguration of philosophy with transcendental idealism. Indeed, and as F6rster notes, Kant himself acknowledges the intellectual conceit that certain readers might find in the declaration. Two of the three times that it appears in the paragraph, Kant sets off the statement in quotes (not reproduced in the standard, Gregor translation). He thereby tacitly indicates a defining qualification, one that goes unremarked by Forster. Kant spells out this qualification at the end the paragraph: "If ... the critical philosophy calls itself a philosophy before which there had been no philosophy at all, it does no more than has been done, will be done, and indeed must be done by anyone who draws up a philosophy on his own plan." (10) The first half of Forster's book centers mainly on Kant's plan critically to think through the possibility of metaphysics. …
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Papers by Phillip Stambovsky