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194Torah, language and philosophy: A jewish critiqueInternational 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
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177Pragmatic conditions for jewish‐christian theological dialogueModern Theology 9 (2): 123-140. 1993.How is Jewish-Christian theological dialogue possible today? Assuming that the possibility of dialogue is not something to be envisioned by any individual thinker a priori, I offer here a study of two examples of successful Jewish-Christian theological dialogue: George Lindbeck's dialogue with Jewish sources and Michael Wyschogrod's dialogue with Christian sources. To garner some general lessons from these examples, I try to reconstruct the general conditions of dialogue which they appear to sh…Read more
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173Behind the Mechitsa: Reflections on The Rules of Textual ReasoningJournal of Textual Reasoning 1 (1). 2002.After twelve years of productive work, the Society for Textual Reasoning has reason to reflect on the rules of reasoning it has nurtured and tested but has not yet adopted, self-consciously, as the rules of its textual reasoning . This essay illustrates some ways of reflecting on these rules. The first section of the essay presents a brief history of STR. The following section, the focal section of the essay, illustrates the rules of TR as displayed in a recent internet discussion sponsored by t…Read more
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160Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine's Thought – By Phillip Cary (review)Modern Theology 27 (1): 206-208. 2011.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
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159Reparative reasoning: From Peirce's pragmatism to Augustine's scriptural semioticModern Theology 25 (2): 187-215. 2009.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
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148Continuity as vagueness: The mathematical antecedents of Peirce’s semioticsSemiotica 96 (3-4): 231-256. 1993.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
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148Philosophic warrants for scriptural reasoningModern 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
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143Scriptural logic: Diagrams for a postcritical metaphysicsModern Theology 11 (1): 65-92. 1995.You ask if metaphysics is possible after modernity, or after Barth and Wittgenstein and Derrida and the critique of foundationalism? May I invite you, by way of response, to listen in on a conversation? It is a dialogue between what I will call a postcritical philosopher ("P") and a postcritical scriptural theologian —— I'll label the latter a "textualist" ("T"). What I mean by "postcritical" would be displayed as the pattern of inquiry traced by this dialogue. I take the term "postcritical"…Read more
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140Charles Peirce's unpragmatic christianity: A rabbinic appraisalAmerican Journal of Theology and Philosophy 9 (1/2). 1988.The great American philosopher, Charles Peirce, calls his pragmatism a continuation of Jesus' teaching, "Ye may know them by their fruit," and labels his cosmology a doctrine of "Christian Love." Nonetheless, I have found Peirce's understanding of Christianity to be surprisingly unpragmatic. Peirce's pragmatism itself displays an unpragmatic side and the tension between his pragmatic and unpragmatic tendencies reappears in his philosophic theology. I am not certain what a consistently pragmati…Read more
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140Rabbinic text process theologyJournal 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
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135Crisis, Call, and Leadership in the Abrahamic Traditions (edited book)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
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134From Phenomenology to Scripture: A General ResponseModern 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
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128"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
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122Pragmatism and the Logic of Political MessianismIn Pragmatic Studies in Judaism, (Judaism in Context 14: (Gorgias Press, 2013): pp. 167-192., Gorgias Press. pp. 167-192. 2013.
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114Religion without violence: the practice and philosophy of scriptural reasoningCascade Books. 2019.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
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114A Scriptural Pragmatism: : Jewish Philosophy's Conception of TruthInternational Philosophical Quarterly 26 (2): 131-135. 1986.In HEBREW SCRIPTURES, in rabbinic literature and for most Jewish thinkers, "truth" (emet) is a character of personal relationships. Truth is fidelity to one's word, keeping promises, saying with the lips what one says in one's heart, bearing witness to what one has seen. Truth is the bond of trust between persons and between God and Humanity. In Western philosophic tradition, however, truth is a character of the claims people make about the world they experience: the correspondence b…Read more
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108Difference 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
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102Eugene 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
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101A 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
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100A propos de l'actualité de Charles PeirceRevue 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
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100Rabbinic SemioticsAmerican 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
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92Peirce's Metaphysical Equivalent of WarTransactions 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
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62The Sentiment of PragmatismThe Monist 75 (4): 551-568. 1992.Scholarly discussion of pragmatism today is pulled in the two different directions of a deconstructive historicism and a semiotic foundationalism. These two directions are co-present in the work of one of pragmatism's founders, Charles Peirce, but accompanied for the most part by a different sentiment. When the two are brought together today it is in debate, and the co-presence is marked by anxiety. In Peirce's work, and in that of the classical pragmatists generally, the copresence was within t…Read more
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30Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion (review)International Studies in Philosophy 25 (1): 103-103. 1993.
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29Compassionate postmodernism: An introduction to postmodern Jewish philosophyThe European Legacy 2 (1): 74-79. 1997.(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.
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27Rethinking Business Ethics, A Pragmatic Approach (Book)Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 37 (4). 2001.Reviews the non-fiction book 'Rethinking Business Ethics, A Pragmatic Approach,' by Sandra B. Rosenthal and Rogene A. Buchholz
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22Contemporary Jewish Philosophies (review)International Philosophical Quarterly 27 (2): 212-214. 1987.
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