Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Books

History of Jewish Philosophy

Ralph Blumenau considers the long and distinguished history of Jewish Philosophy.

This massive book, consisting of contributions from 35 scholars, is obviously a valuable and learned resource for anyone interested in Jewish philosophy, and it contains an immense amount of illuminating material. However, that it is “accessible to general readers as well as to scholars”, as one of the blurbs on the back cover claims, is true of only a few of its 39 chapters. The bulk of the book is certainly unsuitable for anyone who isn’t already very familiar with philosophy in general and technical philosophical vocabulary in particular, or who hasn’t a good knowledge of Judaism. A knowledge of Arabic philosophical terms is sometimes taken for granted. One chapter even assumes that the reader knows of “the infamous meeting” between Heidegger and Cassirer in Davos in 1929 (p.

…