Lenn E. Goodman: Judaism, Humanity, and Nature

Lenn E. Goodman: Judaism, Humanity, and Nature PDF Author: Hava Tirosh-Samuelson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004280766
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Lenn E. Goodman is Professor of Philosophy and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Trained in medieval Arabic and Hebrew philosophy and intellectual history, his prolific scholarship has covered the entire history of philosophy from antiquity to the present with a focus on medieval Jewish philosophy. A synthetic philosopher, Goodman has drawn on Jewish religious sources (e.g., Bible, Midrash, Mishnah, and Talmud) as well as philosophic sources (Jewish, Muslim, and Christian), in an attempt to construct his own distinctive theory about the natural basis of morality and justice. Taking his cue from medieval Jewish philosophers such as Maimonides, Goodman offers a new theoretical framework for Jewish communal life that is attentive to contemporary philosophy and science.

Lenn E. Goodman: Judaism, Humanity, and Nature

Lenn E. Goodman: Judaism, Humanity, and Nature PDF Author: Hava Tirosh-Samuelson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004280766
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book Here

Book Description
Lenn E. Goodman is Professor of Philosophy and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Trained in medieval Arabic and Hebrew philosophy and intellectual history, his prolific scholarship has covered the entire history of philosophy from antiquity to the present with a focus on medieval Jewish philosophy. A synthetic philosopher, Goodman has drawn on Jewish religious sources (e.g., Bible, Midrash, Mishnah, and Talmud) as well as philosophic sources (Jewish, Muslim, and Christian), in an attempt to construct his own distinctive theory about the natural basis of morality and justice. Taking his cue from medieval Jewish philosophers such as Maimonides, Goodman offers a new theoretical framework for Jewish communal life that is attentive to contemporary philosophy and science.

Judaism, Human Rights, and Human Values

Judaism, Human Rights, and Human Values PDF Author: Lenn Evan Goodman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195118340
Category : Ethics, Jewish
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Following on the heels of his critically acclaimed God of Abraham (Oxford, 1996), Lenn E. Goodman here focuses on rights, their grounding in the deserts of beings, and the dignity of persons. In an incisive contemporary dialogue between reason and revelation, Goodman argues for ethical standards and public policies that respect human rights and support the preservation of all beings: animals, plants, econiches, species, habitats, and the monuments of nature and culture. Immersed in the Jewish and philosophical sources, Goodmans argument ranges from the fetus in the womb to the modern nation state, from the problems of pornography and tobacco advertising to the rights of parents and children, individuals and communities, the powerful and powerless--the most ancient and the most immediate problems of human life and moral responsibility. Guided by the probing argumentation that Goodman lays out with distinctive, often poetic clarity, the reader will emerge enlightened and prepared to respond with intelligence and commitment to the sobering moral challenges of the coming century. This is a book for anyone concerned with law, ethics, and the human prospect.

Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself

Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself PDF Author: Lenn E. Goodman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195328825
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
In this book, Lenn E. Goodman writes about the commandment to "love thy neighbor as thyself" from the standpoint of Judaism, a topic and perspective that have not often been joined before. Goodman addresses two big questions: What does that command ask of us? and what is its basis? Drawing extensively on Jewish sources, both biblical and rabbinic, he fleshes out the cultural context and historical shape taken on by this Levitical commandment. In so doing, he restores the richness of its material content to this core articulation of our moral obligations, which often threatens to sink into vacuity as a mere nostrum or rhetorical formula.Goodman argues against the notion that we have this obligation simply because God demands it -- a position that too readily makes ethics seem arbitrary, relativistic, dogmatic, authoritarian, contingent or just unpalatable. Rather he proposes that we learn much about how we ought to think about God from what we know about morals. He shows that natural reasoning and appeals to scripture, tradition, and revelation reinforce one another in ethical deliberation. For Goodman, ethics and theology are not worlds apart connected only by a kind of narrow one-way passage; the two realms of discourse can and should inform each other.Engaging the philosophers, including Aristotle, Spinoza, and Kant, and assembling three-thousand years worth of Jewish textual masterpieces, Goodman skillfully weaves his Gifford Lectures, which he delivered in 2005, into an indispensable work.

The Holy One of Israel

The Holy One of Israel PDF Author: Lenn E. Goodman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190698497
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Holy, holy, holy! The Lord of hosts! The fill of all the earth is His glory. In these few ecstatic words, the prophet Isaiah captured the core of Jewish thinking about humanity, nature, and God. If the idea of holiness generally points toward God's transcendence, Isaiah brings it back down to earth, recognizing God's presence throughout the world. The Holy One of Israel is a philosophical exploration of that remarkable and distinctively Jewish idea: that God is everywhere, yet not in space. Lenn Goodman explores what can be meant by God's uniqueness, presence, and perfection. In a text richly resonant with the classic Jewish sources and in dialogue with the great philosophers, Goodman probes the ideas of revelation, natural law, the problem of evil, the challenges and limits of the idea of God's transcendence, and God's actions in and through nature, including human nature. This book is a must-read for anyone seriously interested in how our ideas about God can inform our lives and our thinking about individual and social responsibility and intellectual and artistic creativity and spiritual growth.

Human Nature & Jewish Thought

Human Nature & Jewish Thought PDF Author: Alan L. Mittleman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691176272
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
What Jewish tradition can teach us about human dignity in a scientific age This book explores one of the great questions of our time: How can we preserve our sense of what it means to be a person while at the same time accepting what science tells us to be true—namely, that human nature is continuous with the rest of nature? What, in other words, does it mean to be a person in a world of things? Alan Mittleman shows how the Jewish tradition provides rich ways of understanding human nature and personhood that preserve human dignity and distinction in a world of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, biotechnology, and pervasive scientism. These ancient resources can speak to Jewish, non-Jewish, and secular readers alike. Science may tell us what we are, Mittleman says, but it cannot tell us who we are, how we should live, or why we matter. Traditional Jewish thought, in open-minded dialogue with contemporary scientific perspectives, can help us answer these questions. Mittleman shows how, using sources ranging across the Jewish tradition, from the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud to more than a millennium of Jewish philosophy. Among the many subjects the book addresses are sexuality, birth and death, violence and evil, moral agency, and politics and economics. Throughout, Mittleman demonstrates how Jewish tradition brings new perspectives to—and challenges many current assumptions about—these central aspects of human nature. A study of human nature in Jewish thought and an original contribution to Jewish philosophy, this is a book for anyone interested in what it means to be human in a scientific age.

On Justice

On Justice PDF Author: Lenn E. Goodman
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1837649480
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Lenn E. Goodman here pioneers a general theory of justice that takes seriously the Jewish sources—biblical, rabbinic, and philosophic. Bringing Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Rawls into dialogue with Saadiah, Halevi, Maimonides, and Spinoza, Goodman’s ontological account offers fresh and original perspectives in moral and social philosophy.

Judaism, Human Rights, and Human Values

Judaism, Human Rights, and Human Values PDF Author: Lenn E. Goodman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9781280471117
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
In this important addition to the field of Jewish ethics, Goodman argues forcefully that the Jewish tradition has a significant contribution to make to the general discourse on ethical issues. After refuting the notion that "human rights" is a purely modern notion, Goodman traces the idea of such rights to its key biblical sources. He goes on to consider the works of medieval thinkers like Saadiah Goan and Moses Maimonides and then applies these and other foundational texts to such contemporary social and political issues as capital punishment, suicide, welfare, pornography, abortion, and nationalism.

Avicenna

Avicenna PDF Author: L E Goodman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134977808
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
the philosophers in the West, none, perhaps, is better known by name and less familiar in actual content of his ideas than the medieval Muslim philosopher, physician, minister and naturalist Abu Ali Ibn Sina, known since the days of the scholastics as Avicenna. In this book the author, himself a philosopher, and long known for his studies of Arabic thought, presents a factual account of Avicenna's philosophy. Setting the thinker in the context of his often turbulent times and tracing the roots and influences of Avicenna's ideas, this book offers a factual philosophical portrait. It details Avicenna's account of being as a synthesis between the seemingly irreconcilable extremes of Aristotelian eternalism and the creationism of monotheistic scripture. It examines Avicenna's distinctive theory of knowledge, his ideas about immortality and individuality, including the famous "floating man argument", his contributions to logic, and his probing thoughts on rhetoric and poetics.

Judaism

Judaism PDF Author: Lenn E. Goodman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317273958
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Judaism, as a religion and a way of life, has guided millions of lives and profoundly influenced its younger sisters, Christianity and Islam, as well as contributing major themes and norms to the liberal and humanistic traditions of the West. Not all Jews are religious, and not all of Judaism is philosophical; but at its core Judaism rests on a complex of values and ideas that address the abiding concerns of philosophy and perennial questions about the meaning and purpose of life, the nature of the universe, the roots and fruits of human responsibility, the character of justice, the worth of nature, and the dignity of persons. Judaism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation examines some of the central questions that such ideas raise, drawing on the ancient and more recent sources of Jewish thought, as viewed from a contemporary philosophical standpoint. This book is an ideal introduction for students of religion and philosophy who want to gain an understanding of the key themes and values of Judaism.

God of Abraham

God of Abraham PDF Author: Lenn Evan Goodman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195359461
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
This cogently argued and richly illustrated book rejects the dichotomy between the God of Abraham and the God of the philosophers to argue that the two are one. In God of Abraham, one of our leading philosophers of religion shows how human values can illuminate our idea of God and how the monotheistic idea of God in turn illuminates our moral, social, cultural, aesthetic, and even ritual understanding. Throughout Goodman draws on a wealth of traditional, philosophical, historical, and anthropological materials, and particularly on a wide range of Jewish sources. He demonstrates how an adequate understanding of the interplay of values with monotheism dissolves many of the longstanding problems of natural theology and ethics and guides us toward a genuinely humanistic moral and social philosophy.