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549Review of Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009) (review)Journal of Modern History 82. 2009.
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342Radical protestantism in Spinoza's thought (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 45 (2): 333-334. 2007.Yitzhak Y. Melamed - Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.2 333-334 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Yitzhak Y. Melamed University of Chicago Graeme Hunter. Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought. Aldershot, UK–Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Pp. vii + 196. Cloth, $89.95. If this book's announced and modest aim—"to present the Christian dimension of Spinoza's thought positively and …Read more
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845“ ‘Let the Law Cut through the Mountain’: Salomon Maimon, Moses Mendelssohn, and Mme. Truth”In Lukas Muehlethaler (ed.), »Höre Die Wahrheit, Wer Sie Auch Spricht«: Stationen des Werks von Moses Maimonides Vom Islamischen Spanien Bis Ins Moderne Berlin, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. pp. 70-76. 2014.Moses Maimonides was a rare kind of radical. Being a genuine Aristotelian, he recommended following the middle path and avoiding extremism. Yet, within the sphere of Jewish philosophy and thought, he created a school of philosophical radicalism, inspiring Rabbis and thinkers to be unwilling to compromise their integrity in searching for the truth, regardless of where their arguments might lead. Both Spinoza and Salomon Maimon inherited this commitment to uncompromising philosophical inquiry. But…Read more
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660Eternity a History (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 2016.Eternity is a unique kind of existence that is supposed to belong to the most real being or beings. It is an existence that is not shaken by the common wear and tear of time. Over the two and half millennia history of Western philosophy we find various conceptions of eternity, yet one sharp distinction between two notions of eternity seems to run throughout this long history: eternity as timeless existence, as opposed to eternity as existence in all times. Both kinds of existence stand in sharp …Read more
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324The Young Spinoza: A Metaphysician in the Making (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2015.Ex nihilo nihil fit. Philosophy, especially great philosophy, does not appear out of the blue. In the current volume, a team of top scholars-both up-and-coming and established-attempts to trace the philosophical development of one of the greatest philosophers of all time. Featuring twenty new essays and an introduction, it is the first attempt of its kind in English and its appearance coincides with the recent surge of interest in Spinoza in Anglo-American philosophy.Spinoza's fame-or notoriety-…Read more
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72Spinoza and German Idealism (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2012.There can be little doubt that without Spinoza, German Idealism would have been just as impossible as it would have been without Kant. Yet the precise nature of Spinoza's influence on the German Idealists has hardly been studied in detail. This volume of essays by leading scholars sheds light on how the appropriation of Spinoza by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel grew out of the reception of his philosophy by, among others, Lessing, Mendelssohn, Jacobi, Herder, Goethe, Schleiermacher, Maimon and, of …Read more
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679“Spinoza’s Respublica divina:” in Otfried Höffe (ed.), Baruch de Spinozas Tractatus theologico-politicus (Berlin: Akademie Verlag (Klassiker Aulegen), forthcoming).In Otfried Höffe (ed.), Baruch de Spinozas Tractatus theologico-politicus, Akademie Verlag (klassiker Aulegen). pp. 177-192. 2013.Chapters 17 and 18 of the TTP constitute a textual unit in which Spinoza submits the case of the ancient Hebrew state to close examination. This is not the work of a historian, at least not in any sense that we, twenty-first century readers, would recognize as such. Many of Spinoza’s claims in these chapters are highly speculative, and seem to be poorly backed by historical evidence. Other claims are broad-brush, ahistorical generalizations: for example, in a marginal note, Spinoza refers to his…Read more
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77Spinoza’s Anti-Humanism: An OutlineIn Smith Justin & Fraenkel Carlos (eds.), The Rationalists, Springer/synthese. pp. 147--166. 2011.
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576Review of Michah Gottlieb, Faith and Freedom: Moses Mendelssohn's Theological-Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011 (review)Journal of Religion. 2012.
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30Review of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, H.b. Nisbet (trans. And ed.), Philosophical and Theological Writings (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (2). 2006.
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795Hasdai Crescas and Spinoza on Actual Infinity and the Infinity of God’s AttributesIn Steven Nadler (ed.), Spinoza and Medieval Jewish Philosophy, Cambridge University Press. pp. 204-215. 2014.The seventeenth century was an important period in the conceptual development of the notion of the infinite. In 1643, Evangelista Torricelli (1608-1647)—Galileo’s successor in the chair of mathematics in Florence—communicated his proof of a solid of infinite length but finite volume. Many of the leading metaphysicians of the time, notably Spinoza and Leibniz, came out in defense of actual infinity, rejecting the Aristotelian ban on it, which had been almost universally accepted for two millenni…Read more
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921Charitable Interpretations and the Political Domestication of Spinoza, or, Benedict in the Land of the Secular ImaginationIn Justin Smith, Eric Schliesser & Mogens Laerke (eds.), The Methodology of the History of Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2013.In a beautiful recent essay, the philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong explains the reasons for his departure from evangelical Christianity, the religious culture in which he was brought up. Sinnot-Armstrong contrasts the interpretive methods used by good philosophers and fundamentalist believers: Good philosophers face objections and uncertainties. They follow where arguments lead, even when their conclusions are surprising and disturbing. Intellectual honesty is also required of scholars who in…Read more
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573A Glimpse into Spinoza’s Metaphysical Laboratory: The Development of Spinoza’s Concepts of Substance and AttributeIn Yitzhak Y. Melamed (ed.), The Young Spinoza: A Metaphysician in the Making, Oxford University Press. pp. 272-286. 2015.At the opening of Spinoza’s Ethics, we find the three celebrated definitions of substance, attribute, and God: E1d3: By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e., that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed [Per substantiam intelligo id quod in se est et per se concipitur; hoc est id cujus conceptus non indiget conceptu alterius rei, a quo formari debeat]. E1d4: By attribute I understand what the intellect pe…Read more
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1034The Sirens of Elea: Rationalism, Monism and Idealism in SpinozaIn Stewart Duncan & Antonia LoLordo (eds.), Debates in Modern Philosophy: Essential Readings and Contemporary Responses, Routledge. 2012.The main thesis of Michael Della Rocca’s outstanding Spinoza book (Della Rocca 2008a) is that at the very center of Spinoza’s philosophy stands the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR): the stipulation that everything must be explainable or, in other words, the rejection of any brute facts. Della Rocca rightly ascribes to Spinoza a strong version of the PSR. It is not only that the actual existence and features of all things must be explicable, but even the inexistence – as well as the absence…Read more
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177Salomon Maimon and the rise of spinozism in German idealismJournal of the History of Philosophy 42 (1): 67-96. 2004.In this paper I explore one issue in the history of German Idealism which has been widely neglected in the existing literature. I argue that Salomon Maimon was the first to suggest that Spinoza's pantheism was a radical religious (or 'acosmistic') view rather than atheism. Following a discussion of the historical context of Maimon's engagement with Spinoza, I point out the main Spinozistic element of Maimon 's philosophy: the view of God as the material cause of the world, or as the subject in w…Read more
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1888Spinoza's Deification of ExistenceOxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 6 75-104. 2013.The aim of this paper is to clarify Spinoza’s views on some of the most fundamental issues of his metaphysics: the nature of God’s attributes, the nature of existence and eternity, and the relation between essence and existence in God. While there is an extensive literature on each of these topics, it seems that the following question was hardly raised so far: What is, for Spinoza, the relation between God’s existence and the divine attributes? Given Spinoza’s claims that there are intimate conn…Read more
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292Principle of Sufficient ReasonStanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyThe Principle of Sufficient Reason is a powerful and controversial philosophical principle stipulating that everything must have a reason or cause. This simple demand for thoroughgoing intelligibility yields some of the boldest and most challenging theses in the history of metaphysics and epistemology. In this entry we begin with explaining the Principle, and then turn to the history of the debates around it. A section on recent discussions of the Principle will be added in the near future.
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409Idolatry and its Premature Rabbinic ObituaryIn Aaron Segal & Daniel Frank (eds.), Debates in Jewish Philosophy - Past and Present, Routledge. pp. 126-136. 2016.The current paper aims at merely charting a brief outline of Jewish philosophical attitudes toward idolatry. In its first part, I discuss some chief trends in Rabbinic approach toward idolatry. In the second part, I examine the role of idolatry in the philosophy of religion of Moses Maimonides and Benedict de Spinoza, two towering figures of medieval and early modern Jewish philosophy. In the third and last part, I address the relevance of the notion of idolatry to contemporary Jewish life, and…Read more
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23Versuch uber die Transzendentalphilosophie (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 43 (3): 366-367. 2005.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Versuch über die TranszendentalphilosophieYitzhak Y. MelamedSalomon Maimon. Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie. Edited by Florian Ehrensperger. Hamburg: Meiner, 2004. Pp. lii + 324. € 19,80."I had now resolved to study Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, of which I had often heard but which I had never seen. The method, in which I studied this work, was quite peculiar. On the first perusal I obtained a vague idea of e…Read more
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402Acosmism or weak individuals?: Hegel, Spinoza, and the reality of the finiteJournal of the History of Philosophy 48 (1). 2009.Like many of his contemporaries, Hegel considered Spinoza a modern reviver of ancient Eleatic monism, in whose system “all determinate content is swallowed up as radically null and void”. This characterization of Spinoza as denying the reality of the world of finite things had a lasting influence on the perception of Spinoza in the two centuries that followed. In this article, I take these claims of Hegel to task and evaluate their validity. Although Hegel’s official argument for the unreality o…Read more
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38Spinoza’s Respublica divina: The Rise and Fall, Virtues and Vices of the Hebrew RepublicIn Otfried Höffe (ed.), Spinoza: Theologisch-Politischer Traktat, De Gruyter. pp. 195-210. 2014.Chapters 17 and 18 of the TTP constitute a textual unit in which Spinoza submits the case of the ancient Hebrew state to close examination. This is not the work of a historian, at least not in any sense that we, twenty-first century readers, would recognize as such. Many of Spinoza’s claims in these chapters are highly speculative, and seem to be poorly backed by historical evidence (Cf. Verbeek (2003), 126). Other claims are broad-brush, ahistorical generalizations: for example, in a marginal n…Read more
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528“Spinoza, Tschirnhaus et Leibniz: Qu’est un monde?“In and Mogens Laerke Raphaële Andrault Pierre-François Moreau (ed.), Spinoza et Leibniz, Ecole Normale Superieure Editions. pp. 85-95. 2014.
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2995The Enigma of Spinoza's Amor Dei IntellectualisIn Noa Naaman (ed.), Descartes and Spinoza on the Passions, Cambridge University Press. pp. 222-238. 2019.The notion of divine love was essential to medieval Christian conceptions of God. Jewish thinkers, though, had a much more ambivalent attitude about this issue. While Maimonides was reluctant to ascribe love, or any other affect, to God, Gersonides and Crescas celebrated God’s love. Though Spinoza is clearly sympathetic to Maimonides’ rejection of divine love as anthropomorphism, he attributes love to God nevertheless, unfolding his notion of amor Dei intellectualis at the conclusion of his E…Read more
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26Review of Michael Ayers (ed.), Rationalism, Platonism and God (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (2). 2009.
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IntroductionIn Yitzhak Y. Melamed & Michael A. Rosenthal (eds.), Spinoza's 'Theological-Political Treatise': A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. 2010.
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