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Pragmatic Studies in Judaism, (Judaism in Context 14: (Gorgias Press, 2013): pp. 167-192. (edited book)Gorgias Press. 2013.
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135Religion without violence: the practice and philosophy of scriptural reasoningCascade Books. 2019.In 1992, Peter Ochs and a few Christian and Muslim colleagues began to gather small groups, in and outside the classroom, to practice close and attentive reading of the sacred Scriptures of the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traditions. The hope was that members of different religions could hear one another through the patient, respectful reading of each other's Scripture. Hearing each other, participants might enter into interreligious relationships that might point a way to the peaceful engagem…Read more
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139Eugene Freeman , "The Relevance of Charles Peirce" (review)Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 21 (1): 121-138. 1985.No reader of The Relevance of Charles Peirce will fail to be impressed by what Max Fisch calls "The Range of Peirce's Relevance.' This exciting volume invites scholars in many of the fields of contemporary philosophy to see what Peirce has to contribute to their methods and their conclusions. Articles in the collection offer a more divided interpretation, however, of the meaning of Peirce's relevance. For some, Peirce's relevance is "extensive": like …Read more
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116Peirce's Metaphysical Equivalent of WarTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 17 (3). 1981.William James declared a moral war, Charles Peirce a metaphysical one: "fall into the ranks then" was his battle cry, follow your colonel. Keep your one purpose steadily and alone in view, and you may promise yourself the attainment of your sole desire, which is to hasten the chariot wheels of redeeming love. (6.448:1893) Peirce's was a war not against war, but against the metaphysical equivalent of war, individuation. In the field of social philosophy, Peirce's enemy …Read more
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133Difference With Respect (To)Semiotics 64-75. 1994.In this essay, I offer several claims about how postmodern preoccupation with DIFFERENCE may be reread, pragmatically. The claims are based on the following, creatively interpretive model of the pragmatic maxim, as applied to what Peirce calls "intellectual concepts." According to the model, the maxim may have a variety of uses, but it can be proven only in so far as it is applied to the one species of "intellectual concepts" that results when real doubts are misrepresented as paper doubts. Th…Read more
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162"Charles Peirce as Postmodern Philosopher"In David Ray Griffin, John B. Cobb Jr, Marcus P. Ford, Pete A. Y. Gunter & Peter Ochs (eds.), Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy: Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne, State University of New York Press. pp. 43-87. 1992.By definition, “logic of postmodernism" would appear to be a contradiction in terms: philosophic post¬modernism emerged as a critique of attempts to found philosophy on some principle of reasoning and to found reasoning on some formal guidelines for how we ought to think. Nonetheless, there are two reasons why Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) ought to be labeled the logician of postmodernism — the philosopher who, more than any other, etched out the normative guidelines for postmodern thinkin…Read more
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172Crisis, Call, and Leadership in the Abrahamic Traditions (edited book)Palgrave Macmillan. 2008."Over three years of study and fellowship, sixteen Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars sought to answer one question: “Do our three scriptures unite or divide us?” They offer their answers in this book: sixteen essays on how certain ways of reading scripture may draw us apart and other ways may draw us, together, into the source that each tradition calls peace. Reading scriptural sources in the classical and medieval traditions, the authors examine how each tradition addresses the “other” wit…Read more
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180Continuity as vagueness: The mathematical antecedents of Peirce’s semioticsSemiotica 96 (3-4): 231-256. 1993.In the course of. his philosophic career, Charles Peirce made repeated attempts to construct mathematical definitions of the commonsense or experimental notion of 'continuity'. In what I will label his Final Definition of Continuity, however, Peirce abandoned the attempt to achieve mathematical definition and assigned the analysis of continuity to an otherwise unnamed extra-mathematical science. In this paper, I identify the Final Definition, attempt to define its terms, and suggest that it bel…Read more
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120Rabbinic SemioticsAmerican Journal of Semiotics 10 (1/2): 35-65. 1993.The German Jewish philosophers Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig introduced a critique and extension of Kant's transcendental philosophy that looks to us today like the foundations of a rabbinic semiotics. It is a theory about the semiotic character of our knowledge of the world, of other humans and of God. And it is a claim that such a theory is embedded in the classical literature of rabbinic Judaism. More recently, the American rabbinic thinker Max Kadushin presented a more e…Read more
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Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy: Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and HartshorneTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 30 (1): 220-226. 1994.
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190Behind the Mechitsa: Reflections on The Rules of Textual ReasoningJournal of Textual Reasoning 1 (1). 2002.After twelve years of productive work, the Society for Textual Reasoning has reason to reflect on the rules of reasoning it has nurtured and tested but has not yet adopted, self-consciously, as the rules of its textual reasoning . This essay illustrates some ways of reflecting on these rules. The first section of the essay presents a brief history of STR. The following section, the focal section of the essay, illustrates the rules of TR as displayed in a recent internet discussion sponsored by t…Read more
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139A Scriptural Pragmatism: : Jewish Philosophy's Conception of TruthInternational Philosophical Quarterly 26 (2): 131-135. 1986.In HEBREW SCRIPTURES, in rabbinic literature and for most Jewish thinkers, "truth" (emet) is a character of personal relationships. Truth is fidelity to one's word, keeping promises, saying with the lips what one says in one's heart, bearing witness to what one has seen. Truth is the bond of trust between persons and between God and Humanity. In Western philosophic tradition, however, truth is a character of the claims people make about the world they experience: the correspondence b…Read more
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18Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy: Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and HartshorneState University of New York Press. 1992.Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
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Pragmatic Cataphasis: Plenitude and Caution in Morning PrayerJournal of Textual Reasoning 5 (1). 2007.
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113A propos de l'actualité de Charles PeirceRevue de Métaphysique et de Morale 91 (4). 1986.Des lecteurs dune récente livraison de Monist, The Relevance of Charles Peirce, pourraient chercher l'actualité de Peirce chez des philosophes contemporains influencés par lui. J'essaie de montrer que Peirce est actuel parce que son apport principal, le pragmatisme, se rattache profondément à des sujets qui nous sont familiers. Formé dans la tradition cartésienne et kantienne de l'epistemologie, l'oeuvre de Peirce intéresse les héritiers de cette tradition.Cependant, son pragmatisme fait apparaî…Read more
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14This major intellectual response to the leading theologian of liberal Judaism provides a significant indication of future directions in Jewish religious thought.
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1Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion (review)International Studies in Philosophy 25 (1): 103-103. 1993.
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22Contemporary Jewish Philosophies (review)International Philosophical Quarterly 27 (2): 212-214. 1987.
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223Torah, language and philosophy: A jewish critiqueInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 18 (3). 1985.Modern philosophy's fascination with language - for the last century, its obsession- may illustrate the axiom that we love to talk about what we desire and we desire what we don't have. From the perspective of traditional Judaism, philosophic obsession with language reflects the modern philosopher's dislocation from those speech communities in which, alone, language has meaning. Natural speech communities, meaning those whose origins are either unknown or referred to an in…Read more
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3Reasoning After Revelation: Dialogues In Postmodern Jewish PhilosophyWestview Press. 1998.Three leading Jewish philosophers explore what it means to participate in post modern Jewish philosophy. They contemplate where Judaism has been, the relevance of age-old Biblical traditions, and the direction in which Judaism is headed in the 21st century.
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188Reparative reasoning: From Peirce's pragmatism to Augustine's scriptural semioticModern Theology 25 (2): 187-215. 2009.This is a genealogical study that traces a “broadly Cartesian” pattern of argumentation: from Augustine’s scriptural semiotic to the “narrowly Cartesian” practice of foundationalism to Charles Peirce’s pragmatic and reparative semiotic. The essay argues (1) that Augustine transformed Stoic logic into a scriptural semiotic; (2) that this semiotic breeds both Cartesian foundationalism and the pragmatic semiotic that repairs it; (3) that Peirce’s semiotic displays the latter. In sum, Augustine’s in…Read more
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12Peirce, Pragmatism, and the Logic of ScriptureCambridge University Press. 1998.This is the first study of Charles Peirce's philosophy as a form of writing and the first study of his pragmatic writings as a critique of the modern attempt to change society by writing philosophy. According to Ochs, Peirce concluded that his own pragmatism displayed the errors of modernity, attempting to recreate rather than repair modern philosophy. His self-critique - which he called pragmaticism - refashions pragmatism as what Ochs calls a 'pragmatic method of reading': a method of, first, …Read more
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