• Yale University
    Department of Philosophy
    Jewish Studies Program
    Administrator
New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America
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    Background: Current interventions to enhance patient self-efficacy, a key mediator of health behavior, have limited primary care application. Objective: To explore the effectiveness of an office-based intervention for training resident physicians to use self-efficacy-enhancing interviewing techniques. Design: Randomized controlled trial. Participants: Family medicine and internal medicine resident physicians at an academic medical center. Measurements: Resident use of SEE IT was coded from audio…Read more
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    Cancer health empowerment for living without pain : Study design and rationale for a tailored education and coaching intervention to enhance care of cancer-related pain
    with R. L. Kravitz, D. J. Tancredi, R. L. Street, D. Kalauokalani, T. Grennan, T. Wun, C. Slee, Dean D. Evans, L. Lewis, and N. Saito
    Background: Cancer-related pain is common and under-treated. This article describes a study designed to test the effectiveness of a theory-driven, patient-centered coaching intervention to improve cancer pain processes and outcomes. Methods/Design: The Cancer Health Empowerment for Living without Pain Study is an American Cancer Society sponsored randomized trial conducted in Sacramento, California. A total of 265 cancer patients with at least moderate pain severity or pain-related impairment we…Read more
  • Neo-Kantianism
    In Brian Leiter & Michael Rosen (eds.), The Oxford handbook of continental philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2007.
  • Neo-kantianism
    In Brian Leiter & Michael Rosen (eds.), The Oxford handbook of continental philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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    Should Jews and Christians Fear the Gifts of the Greeks?
    In Kevin Hart & Michael A. Singer (eds.), The Exorbitant: Emmanuel Levinas Between Jews and Christians, Fordham University Press. pp. 211-215. 2022.
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    Analytic Hasidism: Reflections on Sam Lebens’ Principles of Judaism
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 14 (4): 321-342. 2022.
    Sam Lebens has written a richly inventive and thought-provoking book that contributes greatly to philosophy of religion and to contemporary Jewish philosophy. While there is much that merits response, I will focus here on one central theme of the book: the doctrine, dubbed (Extreme) Hasidic Idealism by Lebens, that we exist only in God’s imagination — accordingly that we are nothing but divine ideas. I will also argue that the book exceeds its self-presentation as a work in the “analytic style” …Read more
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    Analytic Hasidism
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 14 (4): 325-346. 2023.
    Sam Lebens has written a richly inventive and thought-provoking book that contributes greatly to philosophy of religion and to contemporary Jewish philosophy. While there is much that merits response, I will focus here on one central theme of the book: the doctrine, dubbed (Extreme) Hasidic Idealism by Lebens, that we exist only in God’s imagination — accordingly that we are nothing but divine ideas. I will also argue that the book exceeds its self-presentation as a work in the “analytic style” …Read more
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    Karin de Boer has given the best account so far of the reform of Wolffian metaphysics that Kant promised. But does such a reform cohere with the revolutionary goal that Kant also affirmed? Standpoint is singled out as the central meta-concept of Kant’s revolutionary goal, and it is argued that, in the second and third critiques, Kant himself developed his revolutionary insight into the perspectival character of both concept and judgement in ways that he did not anticipate at the time of the firs…Read more
  •  277
    The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Philosophy (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
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    I—Sebastian Gardner: German Idealism
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 (1): 211-228. 2002.
    [Sebastian Gardner] German idealism has been pictured as an unwarranted deviation from the central epistemological orientation of modern philosophy, and its close historical association with German romanticism is adduced in support of this verdict. This paper proposes an interpretation of German idealism which seeks to grant key importance to its connection with romanticism without thereby undermining its philosophical rationality. I suggest that the fundamental motivation of German idealism is …Read more
  •  20
    Editorial note
    with Christian Wiese and Yossef Schwartz
    Open Philosophy 3 (1): 736-738. 2020.
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    Two essential Kantian insights are the significance for rationality of the capacity for criticism and the limits of cognition, discovered when criticism is pursued methodically, that are due to the perspectival character of the human standpoint. After a period of disparagement, these Kantian insights have been sympathetically construed and are now discussed within contemporary analytic philosophy. However, if Kant’s assumption of a single, immutable, human framework is jettisoned, then the ratio…Read more
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    Peirce's ‘Schelling-Fashioned Idealism’ and ‘the Monstrous Mysticism of the East’
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (4): 732-755. 2015.
    Peirce remarks on several occasions in the 1790s on affinities between his evolutionary metaphysics and Schelling's Idealism, behind which, he avers, lies ‘the monstrous mysticism of the East’. What are these affinities? Why are they affinities with Schelling rather than with Hegel? And what is the mysticism in question? I argue that Schelling, like Peirce but unlike Hegel, is committed to evolution, not only across species boundaries, but also across the boundary between the inorganic and the o…Read more
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    Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Post-Kantian Philosophy
    In Herman Cappelen, Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, Oxford University Press. 2016.
    This article examines three moments of the post-Kantian philosophical tradition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Kantianism, Post-Kantian Idealism, and Neo-Kantianism. It elucidates the distinctive methods of a tradition that has never entirely disappeared and is now acknowledged once again as the source of contemporary insights. It outlines two problematics—naturalist scepticism and historicist nihilism—threatening the possibility of metaphysics. The first concerns sceptical wor…Read more
  • Kant and Hegel on the Esotericism of Philosophy
    Dissertation, Harvard University. 1993.
    Why are Kant and Hegel so notoriously hard to understand? It has hitherto gone unnoticed that Kant and Hegel account for philosophy's necessary obscurity by recasting what they think is an ancient tradition of philosophical esotericism. Reconstructing these accounts generates new interpretations of Kant's deduction of freedom and Hegel's deduction of the concept of science . Both deductions aim to make philosophy universally accessible. Each raises, but fails to settle, the question of philosoph…Read more
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    Mythology, essence, and form: Schelling’s Jewish reception in the nineteenth century
    International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 80 (1-2): 71-89. 2019.
    Habermas explained the attraction of German Idealism to twentieth century Jewish philosophers by appealing to the impact of kabbalah on the German Idealists. Schelling was his principal example. In this article, I trace two lines of Jewish reception of Schelling in the nineteenth century. Among German-Jewish thinkers, Schelling was attractive because of his philosophy of mythology, not because of his relation to kabbalah. Among Galician-Jewish thinkers, Schelling was attractive because of what t…Read more
  •  22
    Inner Anti-Semitism or Kabbalistic Legacy? German Idealism’s Relationship to Judaism
    In Jürgen Stolzenberg, Fred Rush & Karl P. Ameriks (eds.), Glaube Und Vernunft. / Faith and Reason, De Gruyter. pp. 254-282. 2010.
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    II—Paul Franks: German Idealism
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 (1): 229-246. 2002.
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    Hilary Putnam
    The Harvard Review of Philosophy 24 127-134. 2017.
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    From Kant to post-Kantian idealism: German idealism
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 (1). 2002.
    German idealism has been pictured as an unwarranted deviation from the central epistemological orientation of modern philosophy, and its close historical association with German romanticism is adduced in support of this verdict. This paper proposes an interpretation of German idealism which seeks to grant key importance to its connection with romanticism without thereby undermining its philosophical rationality. I suggest that the fundamental motivation of German idealism is axiological, and tha…Read more
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