Mark Glouberman

Although Western culture draws substantively on Athens and Jerusalem, hostility tends to be shown towards Jerusalem from the philosophical wing. I attempt to correct the imbalance. Philosophy, I argue, arose in the Greek context because of a problem of self‐confidence. ‘Philosophical rationality’ cannot therefore be taken as normative for rationality generally. The contrast between the Jerusalemite and the Athenian views of self and of the contrasting estimates and explanations of the efficacy (or inefficacy) of the self’s agency is developed through an examination of the main documents of pre‐classical and classical Greece, and the Bible.

Although the _Iliad_ is typically approached as a version of, say, _Catch-22_, the epic is not about armed conflict and its horrors. The war at Troy serves the poet as a metaphor for life. Advanced in the hexameters is an account of the genesis, and a defense, of the humanist view that men and women occupy an autonomous place midway between clods and gods. Plato's harsh criticism of Homer's work comes into focus once Achilles's transformation is interpreted along these philosophical lines. Homer is rejecting what Plato, who flattens human reality and calls it justice, endorses.

The Hebrew Bible is a philosophical testament. Abraham, the first biblical philosopher, calls out to the world in God's name exactly as Plato calls out in the name of the Forms. Abraham comes forward as a critic of pagan thought about, specifically, persons. Moses, to whom the baton is passed, spells out the practical implications of the Bible's core anthropological teachings. In Persons and Other Things Mark Glouberman explores the Bible's philosophy, roughing out in the course of a defence of it how men and women who see themselves in the biblical portrayal are committed to conduct their personal affairs, arrange their social ties, and act in the natural world. Persons and Other Things is also the author's testament about the practice of philosophy. Glouberman sets out the lessons he has acquired as a lifelong learner about thinking philosophically, about writing philosophy, and about philosophers.

The theology of the (Hebrew) Bible, as set out in the Torah’s foundational parts, answers the question “What am I?” not the question “Why is there a world?” So the principle that the Bible’s deity, God, represents, the principle of a category of being not recognized in the pagan thinking whose basic elements Greek philosophy systematizes, first enters “In the day that . . . the Lord God formed [the] man,” not “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth.” The admonition to place God first doesn’t therefore exclude the impersonal principles of being with which the other gods are associated, only denies their adequacy to making sense of your being and of mine, of his being and of hers.

“By transcendental idealism,” Kant explains, “I mean the doctrine that appearances are … representations only, not things in themselves, and that time and space are therefore only sensible forms of our intuition, not determinations given as existing by themselves, nor conditions of objects viewed as things in themselves” ; “… by our sensibility … we do not apprehend [things in themselves] in any fashion whatsoever”. The phenomenality of the objective realm, according to Kant, follows from the fact that the principles of objective knowledge, which demarcate that realm, have validity only for us.