Michael L. Morgan

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.

The only complete edition in English of Baruch Spinoza's works, this volume features Samuel Shirley’s preeminent translations, distinguished at once by the lucidity and fluency with which they convey the flavor and meaning of Spinoza’s original texts. Michael L. Morgan provides a general introduction that places Spinoza in Western philosophy and culture and sketches the philosophical, scientific, religious, moral and political dimensions of Spinoza’s thought. Morgan’s brief introductions to each work give a succinct historical, biographical, and philosophical overview. A chronology and index are included.

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.

Emil Fackenheim’s life work was to call upon the world at large—and on philosophers, Christians, Jews, and Germans in particular—to confront the Holocaust as an unprecedented assault on the Jewish people, Judaism, and all humanity. In this memoir, to which he was making final revisions at the time of his death, Fackenheim looks back on his life, at the profound and painful circumstances that shaped him as a philosopher and a committed Jewish thinker. Interned for three months in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp after Kristallnacht, Fackenheim was released and escaped to Scotland and then to Canada, where he lived in a refugee internment camp before eventually becoming a congregational rabbi and then, for thirty-five years, a professor of philosophy. He recalls here what it meant to be a German Jew in North America, the desperate need to respond to the crisis in Europe and to cope with its overwhelming implications for Jewish identity and community. His second great turning point came in 1967, as he saw Jews threatened with another Holocaust, this time in Israel. This crisis led him on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and ultimately back to Germany, where he continued to grapple with the question, How can the Jewish faith—and the Christian faith—exist after the Holocaust? “An ‘epoch-making’ autobiography.”—Arnold Ages, _Jewish Tribune_

I would like to try to clarify one aspect of the relationship between Levinas’s philosophy — or “ethical metaphysics,” as Edith Wyschogrod has called it — and Judaism as Levinas understands it. In and of itself it is interesting to try to understand Levinas’s thinking and its relationship to his life as a Jew and to Judaism as he takes it to be. But I also have ulterior motives — that is, I have what some might think are larger fish to fry. I will begin by saying something about Hilary Putnam’s article “Levinas and Judaism” in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, edited by Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. I think that I can indicate what those “larger fish” are by pointing to an intriguing tension in Putnam’s discussion.

If, in content and in method, philosophy and religion conflict, can there be a Jewish philosophy? What makes a Jewish thinker a philosopher? Emil L. Fackenheim confronts these questions in a profound and insightful series of essays on the great Jewish thinkers from Maimonides through Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Leo Strauss. Fackenheim also contemplates the task of Jewish philosophy after the Holocaust. While providing access to key Jewish thinkers of the past, this volume highlights the exciting achievements of one of today's most creative and most important Jewish philosophers.

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.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 121 her hermeneutical enterprise. I agree that the Hippolytean interpretation is interesting (how could any interpretation of Heraclitus be without interest?) but I am not convinced that it is new. Here I must be brief: as early as Plato a case can be made for awareness of the moral implications of Heraclitus's cosmological views. The interconnection which Plato sees between Protagorean relativism (moral as well as epistemological ) and Heraclitean (cosmic) flux in the first part of the Theaetetus is indicative of this 052d-e, 16od-e with 172a-b; and for some suggestive commentary see T. Irwin, Plato's Moral Theory [Oxford University Press, 1977], x48-53 ). And given this normative gloss on Heraclitus's cosmological views, based as it is on pre-Hippolytean evidence, I conclude that the new methodology which Osborne proposes is not likely to change our picture of the Presocratics. DANIEL H. FRANK University of Kentucky G. R. F. Ferrari. Listening to the Cicadas:A Study of Plato's "Phaedrus." Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, t987. Pp. xiii + 293. $39.5o. Plato's conception of the philosophical life acknowledges as centrally important a transcendent aspiration. It also incorporates an appreciation for the philosopher's worldly and contingent biography. In the Symposium Plato portrays the stages of philosophical development and how they transcend worldly beauty only to issue, in the end, in a demand for reshaping the world in terms of the soul's ultimate vision and understanding. In the Republic Plato sketches the psychological, moral, and cognitive itinerary of philosophical education and training. Moreover, Plato emphasizes the necessity that directs the philosopher to return to the world, to organize and maintain social-political life, and to cultivate friendship, justice, and psychological health. In the Phaedrus Plato turns to the domain of interpersonal relations, the sphere of love, and there he charts the way in which the philosophical life arises out of the encounter between lover and beloved and then gives shape to that relationship. This confrontation between the philosophical lover and the contingency of his embodiment is one of the central themes of Professor Ferrari's study of the Phaedrus. That theme concerns the domain of "goods which, although external to the philosophic life, nevertheless belong to it more than just accidentally [and] which result from the realisation~0f the philosophic impulse in our actual lives" (a 28). There are a host of scholarly cruxes in the Phaedrus that Ferrari discusses: the role of the dialogue's pastoral setting; the relation between the dialogue's two parts; the relations among philosophy, poetry, and prophecy; the precise character of Plato's psychology in the Phaedrus; the nature of philosophical madness; whether Plato's famous remark on writing is the theme of the dialogue or a mere epilogue to it; the Platonic use of myth; and so forth. But Ferrari does not approach the dialogue through these cruxes; nor does he enter the Phaedrus through Plato's moral philosophy, his epistemology, or his psychology. Rather he engages the dialogue as it presents itself, as a literary document written with care and discipline, and as an attempt 122 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:1 JANUARY 1990 on Plato's part to show something important about the philosophical life. The key word here is 'show', for it is Ferrari's conviction that in the Phaedrus Plato exploits the distinctions between what can be told and what can be shown and between background and foreground in order to exhibit two things: how philosophy and rhetoric are interrelated and hence what the philosophical art is, on the one hand, and how the philosophical life is stimulated by and enriches the experience of interpersonal love, on the other. In the Phaedrus Plato develops a rhetorical strategy for showing the philosophical life by juxtaposing it with alternative lives and by exhibiting it and these alternatives against a carefully articulated background. This is why the portraits of Socrates, Lysias, and Phaedrus are given so vividly and in part why Plato turns to myth, as a philosophical strategy for presenting philosophical love. Philosophy, then, must be rhetorical. But also, rhetoric, to be genuine, must be philosophical. Part of what...