•  95
    In 1992, Peter Ochs and a few Christian and Muslim colleagues began to gather small groups, in and outside the classroom, to practice close and attentive reading of the sacred Scriptures of the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traditions. The hope was that members of different religions could hear one another through the patient, respectful reading of each other's Scripture. Hearing each other, participants might enter into interreligious relationships that might point a way to the peaceful engagem…Read more
  •  7
    Pragmatic Studies in Judaism (edited book)
    with Andrew Schumann, Aviram Ravitsky, Lenn E. Goodman, Furio Biagini, Alan Mittleman, Uri J. Schild, Michael Abraham, Dov Gabbay, Yuval Jobani, and Tzvee Zahavy
    Gorgias Press. 2013.
  •  80
    Eugene Freeman , "The Relevance of Charles Peirce" (review)
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 21 (1): 121-138. 1985.
    No reader of The Relevance of Charles Peirce will fail to be impressed by what Max Fisch calls "The Range of Peirce's Relevance.' This exciting volume invites scholars in many of the fields of contemporary philosophy to see what Peirce has to contribute to their methods and their conclusions. Articles in the collection offer a more divided interpretation, however, of the meaning of Peirce's relevance. For some, Peirce's relevance is "extensive": like …Read more
  •  75
    Peirce's Metaphysical Equivalent of War
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 17 (3). 1981.
    William James declared a moral war, Charles Peirce a metaphysical one: "fall into the ranks then" was his battle cry, follow your colonel. Keep your one purpose steadily and alone in view, and you may promise yourself the attainment of your sole desire, which is to hasten the chariot wheels of redeeming love. (6.448:1893) Peirce's was a war not against war, but against the metaphysical equivalent of war, individuation. In the field of social philosophy, Peirce's enemy …Read more
  •  97
    Difference With Respect (To)
    Semiotics 64-75. 1994.
    In this essay, I offer several claims about how postmodern preoccupation with DIFFERENCE may be reread, pragmatically. The claims are based on the following, creatively interpretive model of the pragmatic maxim, as applied to what Peirce calls "intellectual concepts." According to the model, the maxim may have a variety of uses, but it can be proven only in so far as it is applied to the one species of "intellectual concepts" that results when real doubts are misrepresented as paper doubts. Th…Read more
  •  103
    "Charles Peirce as Postmodern Philosopher"
    In Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy: Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne, Suny Press. pp. 43-87. 1994.
    By definition, “logic of postmodernism" would appear to be a contradiction in terms: philosophic post¬modernism emerged as a critique of attempts to found philosophy on some principle of reasoning and to found reasoning on some formal guidelines for how we ought to think. Nonetheless, there are two reasons why Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) ought to be labeled the logician of postmodernism — the philosopher who, more than any other, etched out the normative guidelines for postmodern thinkin…Read more
  •  111
    Crisis, Call, and Leadership in the Abrahamic Traditions (edited book)
    with W. Johnson
    Palgrave Macmillan. 2008.
    "Over three years of study and fellowship, sixteen Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars sought to answer one question: “Do our three scriptures unite or divide us?” They offer their answers in this book: sixteen essays on how certain ways of reading scripture may draw us apart and other ways may draw us, together, into the source that each tradition calls peace. Reading scriptural sources in the classical and medieval traditions, the authors examine how each tradition addresses the “other” wit…Read more
  •  136
    In the course of. his philosophic career, Charles Peirce made repeated attempts to construct mathematical definitions of the commonsense or experimental notion of 'continuity'. In what I will label his Final Definition of Continuity, however, Peirce abandoned the attempt to achieve mathe­matical definition and assigned the analysis of continuity to an otherwise unnamed extra-mathematical science. In this paper, I identify the Final Definition, attempt to define its terms, and suggest that it bel…Read more
  •  86
    Rabbinic Semiotics
    American Journal of Semiotics 10 (1/2): 35-65. 1993.
    The German Jewish philosophers Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig introduced a critique and extension of Kant's transcendental philosophy that looks to us today like the foundations of a rabbinic semiotics. It is a theory about the semiotic character of our knowledge of the world, of other humans and of God. And it is a claim that such a theory is embedded in the classical literature of rabbinic Judaism. More recently, the American rabbinic thinker Max Kadushin presented a more e…Read more
  •  40
    Jewish Philosophy in a Secular Age (review)
    Teaching Philosophy 14 (2): 209-214. 1991.
  • Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy: Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne
    with David Ray Griffin, John B. Cobb, Marcus P. Ford, and Pete A. Y. Gunter
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 30 (1): 220-226. 1994.
  • Pragmatic Cataphasis: Plenitude and Caution in Morning Prayer
    Journal of Textual Reasoning 5 (1). 2007.
  •  12
    Epilogue
    Modern Theology 11 (2): 219-227. 1995.
  •  85
    A propos de l'actualité de Charles Peirce
    with Mireille Delbraccio
    Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 91 (4). 1986.
    Des lecteurs dune récente livraison de Monist, The Relevance of Charles Peirce, pourraient chercher l'actualité de Peirce chez des philosophes contemporains influencés par lui. J'essaie de montrer que Peirce est actuel parce que son apport principal, le pragmatisme, se rattache profondément à des sujets qui nous sont familiers. Formé dans la tradition cartésienne et kantienne de l'epistemologie, l'oeuvre de Peirce intéresse les héritiers de cette tradition.Cependant, son pragmatisme fait apparaî…Read more
  •  8
    Reviewing the Covenant: Eugene B. Borowitz and the Postmodern Renewal of Jewish Theology
    with Eugene B. Borowitz and Yudit Kornberg Greenberg
    SUNY Press. 2000.
    This major intellectual response to the leading theologian of liberal Judaism provides a significant indication of future directions in Jewish religious thought.
  •  29
    Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion (review)
    International Studies in Philosophy 25 (1): 103-103. 1993.
  • Jewish Sensibilities
    Journal of Textual Reasoning 4 (3). 2006.
  •  21
    Contemporary Jewish Philosophies (review)
    International Philosophical Quarterly 27 (2): 212-214. 1987.
  •  1
    Three leading Jewish philosophers explore what it means to participate in post modern Jewish philosophy. They contemplate where Judaism has been, the relevance of age-old Biblical traditions, and the direction in which Judaism is headed in the 21st century.
  •  174
    Torah, language and philosophy: A jewish critique
    International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 18 (3). 1985.
    Modern philosophy's fascination with language - for the last century, its obsession- may illustrate the axiom that we love to talk about what we desire and we desire what we don't have. From the perspective of traditional Judaism, philosophic obsession with language reflects the modern philosopher's dislocation from those speech communities in which, alone, language has meaning. Natural speech communities, meaning those whose origins are either unknown or referred to an in…Read more
  •  142
    This is a genealogical study that traces a “broadly Cartesian” pattern of argumentation: from Augustine’s scriptural semiotic to the “narrowly Cartesian” practice of foundationalism to Charles Peirce’s pragmatic and reparative semiotic. The essay argues (1) that Augustine transformed Stoic logic into a scriptural semiotic; (2) that this semiotic breeds both Cartesian foundationalism and the pragmatic semiotic that repairs it; (3) that Peirce’s semiotic displays the latter. In sum, Augustine’s in…Read more
  •  13
    Peirce, Pragmatism, and the Logic of Scripture
    Cambridge University Press. 1998.
    This is the first study of Charles Peirce's philosophy as a form of writing and the first study of his pragmatic writings as a critique of the modern attempt to change society by writing philosophy. According to Ochs, Peirce concluded that his own pragmatism displayed the errors of modernity, attempting to recreate rather than repair modern philosophy. His self-critique - which he called pragmaticism - refashions pragmatism as what Ochs calls a 'pragmatic method of reading': a method of, first, …Read more
  •  125
    From Phenomenology to Scripture: A General Response
    Modern Theology 16 (3): 341-345. 2000.
    This is a response to a Symposium on Phenomenology and Scripture. In examining a move from phenomenology to scripture, this symposium does not address all possible readers; it addresses a specific readership, for a specific reason, and within the framework of specific assumptions. By way of response, I want first to identify a few features of what I take to be the symposium’s specific address or context. Then, I will comment on what messages I believe the authors have delivered to this context. …Read more
  •  93
    A Pragmatic Method of Reading Confused Philosophic Texts: The Case of Peirce's "Illustrations"
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 25 (3). 1989.
    A Pragmatic Method of Reading Confused Philosophic Texts: The Case of Peirce's "Illustrations" In 1878, Charles Peirce introduced a method for making confused ideas clear. In this essay, I put Peirce's method to work as a method for making confused writing clear, in particular, for clarifying the meaning of confused philosophic arguments as they appear in philosophic essays. In Section I, I introduce the method as a Pragmatic Method of Reading …Read more
  •  125
    Rabbinic text process theology
    Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 1 (1): 141-177. 1992.
    What would a Jewish process theology look like if it also adopted the a priori principles of rabbinic Judaism - among them, the authority of Torah given on Sinai, an historically particular revelation of divine instruction for a particular people, and the authority of the Oral Torah, an historically evolving hermeneutic, according to which that revelation becomes normative practice for communities of observant Jews? I trust this would not be a naturalism, since it would be a theology that found …Read more
  •  124
    Philosophic warrants for scriptural reasoning
    Modern Theology 22 (3): 465-482. 2006.
    Scriptural Reasoning (SR) is a practice of philosophic theology that is offered as a rationally warranted albeit fallible response to the inadequacies of modern liberal and anti-liberal theologies whether they are adopted as academic projects or as dimensions of lived religious practice. In terms of everyday religious practice in the West today, SR may be characterized as an effort, at once, to help protect Abrahamic folk traditions (that is, of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) from the cultura…Read more
  •  145
    A Review of Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought by Phillip Cary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xxiv + 344 pp. Phillip Cary has written another highly significant book on Augustine, and his writing displays the art of a master stylist. A complement to his Inner Grace, Outward Signs extends Cary’s thesis in Augustine and the Invention of the Inner Self: that Augus- tine’s Trinitarian and semiotic theology, groundbreaking as it was, remains beholden t…Read more
  •  26
    (1997). Compassionate postmodernism: An introduction to postmodern Jewish philosophy. The European Legacy: Vol. 2, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, pp. 74-79.
  •  5
    "Textual Reasoning" is the name a family of contemporary Jewish thinkers has given to its overlapping practices of Jewish philosophy and theology. This collection represents the most public expression to date of the shared work, over a period of 12 years, of this society of "textual reasoners." Although the movement of textual reasoning is diverse and pluriform, it is characterized at bottom by the pursuit of the claim that there are significant affinities between Jewish forms of reading and rea…Read more