Hannah Hashkes

Describing rabbinic reasoning as a rational response to experience. Hashkes combines insights from the analytic philosophy of Wittgenstein, Quine, and Davidson with the semiotics of Peirce to construe knowledge as systematic reasoning occurring within a community of inquiry. Her reading of the works of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion allows her to create a philosophical bridge between a discourse of God and a discourse of reason. This synthesis of analytic philosophy and pragmatism, hermeneutics and theology provides Hashkes with a sophisticated tool to understand Rabbinic Judaism. It also makes this study both unique and path breaking in contemporary Jewish philosophy and Rabbinic thought.

Rorty and the Religious: Christian Engagements with a Secular Philosopher brings together twelve essays discussing Rorty’s philosophy from a theological point of view. These essays, tackling Rorty’s epistemology, moral views, and social vision, carry out “constructive and serious” engagement with his work. The writers even declare they find “promising nuggets” in Rorty’s work for addressing particular questions within philosophy and theology.Why would Christian theologians bother to engage in this manner with a philosopher whose epistemological and moral thought has centered on the notion of conversation and yet has declared religion a “conversation stopper?”1 Calling himself “religiously unmusical,”...

This paper describes the practice of rabbinic Torah-Study in Pragmatist epistemological terms. Pragmatists describe the quest for knowledge as a process in which we interpret our experiences and thereby construct an idea of our reality. This description creates or generates a tension between the constructive aspect of the knowledge quest and the idea of an independent reality. The paper argues that Pragmatism shares this tension, as well as the hermeneutical and pragmatic method for overcoming it, with the rabbinic concept of "Torah Study." This association is illustrated through a close reading of a Midrash on the first verse of the Biblical "Woman of Valor" song.