Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Old Series: Volume 4, Number 3 (September 1995)

Journal of Textual Reasoning

For our shared work, this is a year pregnant with many new possibilities. We have many new plans and projects to tell you about, including a new Network Editorial Board with nine new Contributing Editors. But all we’ll mention now is that our new Managing Editor is David Seidenberg of the Jewish Theological Seminary. The time to tell you about the rest is after the New Year...For now, the present (issue) is too full to leave room for (words about) the future! G’mar Hatimah Tovah!

Old Series: Volume 4, Number 1 (February 1995)

Journal of Textual Reasoning

We don’t read alone. You might consider this a rallying cry of at least a significant sub-group of the Postmodern Jewish Philosophy Network. We read with. “Ehyeh imach,” says God to Moses out of the Burning Bush, “I will be with you”; and being-with is a postmodern theme, in three senses: We don’t read alone. This means, first, that the text we read is not a naked text whose meaning displays itself to anyone who would see it. It is a text that speaks in certain ways to certain groups of people. We read with-others as part of some group. …

Old Series: Volume 3, Number 3 (October 1994)

Journal of Textual Reasoning

“Imaginal Bodies” heads the title of the paper Elliot Wolfson is scheduled to offer at a session on “Incarnation in Judaism and Christianity” at this year’s American Academy of Religion conference in Chicago (November 18-22). If you place that headline alongside the careful, critical textual reading you would expect to find in Wolfson’s work, then you may have an icon of the activity that characterizes some our members’ recent work in postmodern Jewish philosophy. It is an activity of reading foundational Jewish texts in a way that is informed, at once, by reasoned, disciplined criticism and by some presence (or …

Old Series: Volume 3, Number 4 (December 1994)

Journal of Textual Reasoning

Rosenzweig and Levinas (along with Buber and Cohen) are the principle parents of the founding members of this Network, and Gibbs’ book brings them into close dialogue with each other, with their peers in late modern/early postmodern thought, and with us. This is therefore a very important book and a very important occasion, for both the Academy and the Postmodern Jewish Philosophy Network. All are welcome. So please come!

For a warmup, to get you ready, we enclose a preliminary review of Gibbs’ book, by Martin Srajek (he’ll be offering different words at the Boston event). In a future issue, …

Old Series: Volume 3, Number 1 (May 1994)

Journal of Textual Reasoning

“Know thyself?” “But do not separate yourself from the community?” Philosophy is not your basic team sport. Even postmodernists suspicious of Enlightenment models tend to practice philosophy alone, in the kind of quiet solitude that lets them attend, for long stretches of undisturbed time, to long lines of undisturbed inference. At the same time, as exhibited in our previous issues, these postmodern philosophers tend to write about the virtues of teamwork: “relationality,” for example, or “dialogue,” “love,” or “communities of interpretation.” It is not yet clear how these virtues enter the long lines of postmodern inference. Do they enter as …

Old Series: Volume 3, Number 2 (August 1994)

Journal of Textual Reasoning

A lingering message of David Hartman’s “Sinai and Messianism,” some years ago now (in Joy and Responsibility, 1978), is that, in place of a utopian messianism that may displace the present in favor of a hoped for future, Talmudic discourse offers Jews a normalized messianism that embodies the future, piecemeal, in the dialogic activities of this present moment of study and caring action. Aryeh Cohen’s essay on “Framing Women/Constructing Exile” (BITNETWORK Vol 3.2) has initiated dialogues among philosophers and Talmudists that we hope will remain a significant part of the NETWORK’s activities. Reports on these dialogues, in fact, displace most …

Old Series: Volume 2, Number 3 (November 1993)

Journal of Textual Reasoning

No abstract provided.

Old Series: Volume 2, Number 2 (February 1993)

Journal of Textual Reasoning

Welcome back, folks. It has been a long break since Vol 2.1 in August ’92, but we are back in force, with enough to say for two volumes. Splitting up our sayables in two, this means we will return rather shortly with Vol 2.3.

You could begin Vol 2.2 immediately by skipping down a page; otherwise, this Forward will greet you with a little theme: the force of sayables. According to Sextus, the Stoic philosophers said that thoughts refer to things only by way of certain “sayables” (lekta), which are the things as signified or as said. As displayed in …

Old Series: Volume 2, Number 1 (August 1992)

Journal of Textual Reasoning

Welcome to the first post-preparatory issue of the Bitnetwork. Post-preparatory, because, after a year of collecting a sense of who we are, we find our collection too vast and varied to identify, in too prepared a way, and, willy nilly, we find ourselves speaking rather than collecting. Acting, you might say, without preparation. If there is a postmodern philosophic self, it appears so much larger and messier than a pineal gland that we might rather call it a society than a self (close enough to William James' sense of personal identity, a bit more social perhaps than Julia Kristeva's). It …

Books, Briefly Noted, Michael Zank

Journal of Textual Reasoning

No abstract provided.

Teaching The Bible As A “Troubling Text”, Michael Zank

Journal of Textual Reasoning

No abstract provided.

Engaging And Teaching Troubling Texts, Aryeh Cohen

Journal of Textual Reasoning

No abstract provided.

What Is “Troubling” About Troubling Texts?, Shaul Magid

Journal of Textual Reasoning

No abstract provided.

Introduction To “Teaching Troubling Texts”, Nancy Levine

Journal of Textual Reasoning

No abstract provided.

Statutes That Were Not Good (Ezekiel 20:25-26): Traditional Interpretations, Hyam Maccoby

Journal of Textual Reasoning

No abstract provided.

Contents

Journal of Textual Reasoning

No abstract provided.

Otherwise Than Testimony, Or: How Might Testimony Testify?, Jonathan L. Sherwood

Journal of Textual Reasoning

This paper was originally presented at an International Association for Philosophy and Literature Annual Conference panel in May, 1996. The title and theme of the panel was “Post-Testimonial Holocaust Writing”. In this title (and in the other papers presented), I heard these implicit questions: “What are we to do and think in this time, as the era of direct testimonial transmission from survivors of the Holocaust comes to a close with their passing away? What are we to make of literature that is about the Holocaust but that no longer comes from the testimony of survivors?” Listening with my own …

Philo Of Alexandria And The Vocabulary Of Belief, Ryan Hendrickson

Journal of Textual Reasoning

Philo of Alexandria is a thinker who defies taxonomy. The taxonomists in religious studies class him as a “Jewish philosopher,” implying that both his Judaism and his philosophy are paramount to his identity, yet his “philosophy” seems almost non-rational, and his Judaism non-traditional at best. I suggest that the best way to understand Philo’s writings and motivations is to loosen the modern attempt at classification and try to apprehend him on his own terms.

Contents

Journal of Textual Reasoning

No abstract provided.

Textual Reasoning In Three Stages, Steven Kepnes

Journal of Textual Reasoning

In returning to textuality postmodern Jewish philosophy becomes textual reasoning. Educated by both the modality of rabbinic thought and the philosophy of pragmatism textual reasoning always begins with a life problem, a form of human suffering, an ethical dilemma which it attempts to address.

Old Series: Volume 1, Number 2 (July 1991)

Journal of Textual Reasoning

Welcome to the penultimate preparatory issue of the Bitnetwork. Preparatory, because we are still collecting a sense of what family of inquiries falls within the purview of our species of “postmodernism,” delaying in characteristically modern fashion a DECISION about what we will be as an electronic journal. Penultimate, because we plan to be preparatory just one more time.

This issue features the following sections:

DESCRIPTIONS: as in the first issue, more abstracts of our members’ current work. The goal remains collecting a family resemblance class of descriptions of what we do, then searching for the class characters that may define …

Old Series: Volume 1, Number 3 (November 1991)

Journal of Textual Reasoning

At the AAR annual meeting, we hope you will be able to participate in three discussions concerning postmodern Jewish philosophy. What is Postmodern Jewish Philosophy?

NU? What IS it, after all? This is an opportunity for Bitnetwork members to discuss the question face-to-face, to reach no answer (except perhaps to declaim questions that begin in the fashion of to on?), to but decide anyway on how to fashion the Bitnetwork.

Our agenda will be, first, to search for the identity of postmodern Jewish philosophy, perhaps like Socrates chasing the Sophist. The points of departure are: the contents of the last …

Old Series: Volume 1, Number 1 (February 1991)

Journal of Textual Reasoning

We are a discussion network funded in our founding year as a Collaborative Project of the American Academy of Religion. “The Postmodern Jewish Philosophy Bitnetwork” represents the first stage of a BITNET journal of Postmodern Judaism, philosophically considered: referring both to the plurality of contemporary Jewish religious expressions, philosophically considered and to the plurality of postmodern methods of Jewish philosophy and philosophical theology. In the history of Judaism, the two principle paradigms of philosophic inquiry have been the Jewish Aristotelianism and neo-Platonism of the Arabic speaking Jewish philosophers of medieval Spain, and the Jewish Kantianism of the largely German speaking …

No Relief From The War Of Words. And Yet, Speak We Must!, Michael Zank

Journal of Textual Reasoning

No abstract provided.

Contents

Journal of Textual Reasoning

No abstract provided.

Some Thoughts On Hermeneutics And Textual Reasoning, Michael Zank

Journal of Textual Reasoning

No abstract provided.

Pee(K)Ing Into Derrida’S Underpants: Circumcision, Textual Multiplexity, And The Cannibalistic Mother, Philip Culbertson

Journal of Textual Reasoning

No abstract provided.

Menahem Fisch. Rational Rabbis: Science And The Talmudic Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. 263 Pp., Noam Zohar

Journal of Textual Reasoning

No abstract provided.

Contents

Journal of Textual Reasoning

No abstract provided.

Passing Through, Michal Lemberger

Journal of Textual Reasoning

No abstract provided.