Michael L. Morgan

This interesting set of essays situates Hobbes's writings in the political and religious debates of seventeenth-century England. The essays' strengths lie in their historical and political insights. The authors of the papers engage in detailed examination of Hobbes and English history in order to shed light on several slighted dimensions of Hobbes's works. The cases for these interpretations are mounted with sensitivity and skill. The upshot is a stimulating book for philosophers that raises more questions than it answers.

In Discovering Levinas, Michael L. Morgan shows how this thinker faces in novel and provocative ways central philosophical problems of twentieth-century philosophy and religious thought. He tackles this task by placing Levinas in conversation with philosophers such as Donald Davidson, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Onora O'Neill, Charles Taylor, and Cora Diamond. He also seeks to understand Levinas within philosophical, religious, and political developments in the history of twentieth-century intellectual culture. Morgan demystifies Levinas by examining his unfamiliar and surprising vocabulary, interpreting texts with an eye to clarity, and arguing that Levinas can be understood as a philosopher of the everyday. Morgan also shows that Levinas's ethics is not morally and politically irrelevant nor is it excessively narrow and demanding in unacceptable ways. Neither glib dismissal nor fawning acceptance, this book provides a sympathetic reading that can form a foundation for a responsible critique.

We simply have no better account of Hobbes's religious thinking and religious projects than Martinich's excellent new book about Hobbes's Leviathan. According to Martinich, Hobbes was not an atheist, and his political theory was not that of a secularist. Rather he was a Calvinist, a monarchist, and an advocate of an episcopal church. Like so many others in the seventeenth century, Hobbes sought to meet the challenges which the scientific revolution posed for a Biblical faith. Hence, Leviathan has two goals, " to show that the distinctively religious content of the Bible could be reconciled with the new science and to prove that religion could not legitimately be used to destabilize a government".

This picture of philosophy and politics harbors as much caricature as accuracy. Even in Plato, who is often cited as its earliest author, the contrast occurs less sharply. Arguably Plato never saw philosophy as wholly transcendent, nor politics as wholly empirical, even in the Republic. But the Western tradition has rarely appreciated the nuance in Plato. The radical contrast has a long and influential history with at least one useful result, that the question of the relationship between philosophy and politics is frequently brought vividly to our attention.

Designed to facilitate a thoughtful and informed reading of Spinoza's _Ethics_, this anthology provides the _Ethics_, related writings, and two valuable appendices: List of Propositions from the _Ethics_, which helps readers to trace the development of key themes; and Citations in Proofs, a list of all the propositions, corollaries, and scholia in the Ethics, together with all the definitions, axioms, propositions, corollaries, and scholia to which Spinoza refers in the proofs--thus, readers can locate, for a given item, each instance where Spinoza refers to it.

Emmanuel Levinas conceives of our lives as fundamentally interpersonal and ethical, claiming that our responsibilities to one another should shape all of our actions. While many scholars believe that Levinas failed to develop a robust view of political ethics, Michael L. Morgan argues against understandings of Levinas’s thought that find him politically wanting or even antipolitical. Morgan examines Levinas’s ethical critique of the political as well as his Jewish writings—including those on Zionism and the founding of the Jewish state—which are controversial reflections of Levinas’s political expression. Unlike others who dismiss Levinas as irrelevant or anarchical, Morgan is the first to give extensive treatment to Levinas as a serious social political thinker whose ethics must be understood in terms of its political implications. Morgan reveals Levinas’s political commitments to liberalism and democracy as well as his revolutionary conception of human life as deeply interconnected on philosophical, political, and religious grounds.

Jewish destiny works itself out in the nexus between two poles: between temporal, finite human experience and the eternity of divine governance and orientation. At times the two poles seem close; an intimacy with God seems accessible and worthy of human aspiration. At other times, however, the poles diverge, and God seems remote, human affairs seem a vale of tears, the domain of human responsibility alone. Like human existence, Judaism is embedded in history and yet cleaves to transcendence, and no one has understood the depths of this polarity for human existence in general and for Judaism in particular better than Franz Rosenzweig.

Confronting the challenges of the 20th century, from modernity and the Great War to the Holocaust and postmodern culture, Jewish thinkers have wrestled with such fundamental issues as redemption and revelation, eternity and history, messianism and politics. From the turn of the century through the 1920s, European Jewish intellectuals confronted alienation and the challenges of modernity by seeking secure grounds for a meaningful life. After the Holocaust and the fall of Nazism, the rich results of their thinking—on topics such as transcendence, redemption, revelation, and politics—were reinterpreted in an atmosphere of increasing disillusion and fragmentation. In Interim Judaism, Michael L. Morgan traces the evolution of this shift in values, as expressed in the work of social thinkers, novelists, artists, and poets as well as philosophers and theologians at the beginning and end of the century. Focusing on the problem of objectivity, the experience of the transcendent, and the relationship between redemption and politics, he argues that the outcome for contemporary Jews is a pragmatic style of religiosity that has abandoned traditional conceptions of Judaism and is searching and waiting for new ones, a condition that he describes as "interim Judaism." Published with the generous support of Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati.

This brief volume, one of the Past Masters series, is a fascinating introduction to the full range of Thomas Hobbes's philosophy. The book has three parts. In the first Tuck describes Hobbes's life and gives a "brief, synoptic view of Hobbes's philosophy" as it develops in the context of sixteenth-century history and thought. The second part discusses Hobbes's arguments on science, ethics, politics, and religion. Finally, Tuck surveys a variety of styles of Hobbes interpretation, from Hobbes's contemporaries to our own today.

To this day Jewish thinkers struggle to articulate the appropriate response to the unprecedented catastrophe of the Holocaust. Here, Morgan offers the first comprehensive overview of Post-Holocaust Jewish theology, quoting extensively from and interpreting all of the significant American writings of the movement. Morgan's lucid analysis clarifies the background of the movement in the postwar period, its origins, its character, and its legacy for subsequent thinking, theological and otherwise. Ultimately, Morgan's primary purpose is to tell the story of the movement, to illuminate its real, deep point, and to demonstrate its continuing relevance today.