Table of Contents
Translator's Introduction Lenn J. Schramm xv
Preface xxi
Part 1 Zoön and Bios
Chapter 1 Living and Knowing: Social Images and Scholarly Discourses 3
Differences and Continuity 11
Chapter 2 Toward a Genealogy of Ethics 17
1 Pleasure and Pain: The First Level of Ethics 17
2 The Myth of Adam's Fall and "True Knowledge of Good and Evil" 21
3 The Concerns of Moral Philosophy 22
4 From the First Level to the Second Level 30
5 The Third Level: Theoretical Deduction or Argumentation Genealogy 32
6 Modified States of Consciousness and the Sacred 36
7 Argumentation Ethics and Underdetermination 39
8 The Morality of Indignation 43
9 A Schematic Representation 45
Part 2 The Subject and Time
Chapter 3 A Natural Subject in the Fourteenth Century?
Hasdai Crescas on Determinism and Responsibility 49
1 Return of the Subject or Final Death? A Third Term 49
2 Hasdai Crescas, Determinism, and Freedom 54
3 Determined but Responsible 63
4 A Priori Responsibility and Factum Responsibility 66
5 "Subject of" and "Subject to" 71
6 Crescas and Spinoza: "God's Joy" 74
Chapter 4 Reality, Perfection, and "Glory" 78
1 "By Reality and Perfection I Understand the Same Thing" 78
a Reality as Perfection and Perfection as a Model 78
b Wisdom and Perfection 87
c Toward Acquiescence and Joy: Provisional Morality and Habit 95
d Acquiescence and "Gloria" 99
e Human Dignity 103
2 "Glory" 105
a Gloria/Kavod in Scripture and in Spinoza 105
b Human Perfection according to Maimonides 108
c Revisiting Gloria/Kavod in the Sacred Books, according to Spinoza's Ethics 112
d The Third Kind of Knowledge 117
e Wisdom(s) 119
Chapter 5 The God of Persons and the From of the Human Body 125
1 Who or What? 125
2 The Form 127
3 The Human Body, the Subject of the Rights of Man 134
4 The Problems of Limits at the Start and End of Human Life 135
5 The Pragmatism of Talmudic Law 138
6 "I" Is the Tetragrammaton 141
7 The God of the Philosophers, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob 144
8 The Unique Person and His or Her God 147
9 The Voices of Prophecy Reflected on Themselves 152
10 An Absolute Singular? 155
11 What Am I? 156
12 Idolatry Does Not Have to Be Pagan 162
Part 3 The Radical Monism of Body and Mind
Chapter 6 A Spinozist Perspective on Evolution and the Theory of Action: from Analytic Philosophy to Spinoza 167
1 Immanent Causality and Temporal Evolution 167
2 Spinoza's Physics and Spinoza's Animism 171
3 The Synthetic Identity of Properties 176
4 Synthetic Identity, Referential Opacity, and the Underdetermination of Theories 177
5 Action and Perception: The Anomalous Monism of Donald Davidson 180
6 Action and Perception in the Light of Spinoza's Monism 185
7 The Analogy with Physical Magnitudes 188
8 Functional Self-Organization 190
9 Moral Judgment 193
10 Some Astonishing Neurophysiological Findings 195
Chapter 7 Intentional Self-Organization: Toward a Physical Theory of Intentionality 197
1 Intention as Ex Nihilio Creation? 197
2 Self-Organization Is Not an Ex Nihilo Causa Sui 200
3 Is a Physical Theory of Intentionality Possible? 203
4 Physical and Chemical Reductionism and Phenomenological Reduction 204
5 Meaningless Complexity in the Information Sciences 205
6 "Sophistication" as a Measurement of Meaningful Complexity 210
7 Intentional Self-Organization 212
a The Origin of Goals and the Types of Self-Organization 212
b The Transformation of a Causal Sequence into a Procedure 214
8 A Non-Intentional Model of Intentional Behavior 215
a Time Reversal 215
b A Satisfaction Function and Its Origin 216
c A Non-Intentional Model of Intentional Attitudes 218
9 Consciousness-Memory and Unconscious Self-Organization 219
10 Infinite Sophistication 220
11 Provisional Conclusions 224
a Action and Perception 224
b The Underdetermination of Theories and Intersubjectivity 225
c Modeling the Models? The Transcendental Nature of Logic and Ethics 226
d Reason and Common Notions 227
Part 4 Time and Eternity
Chapter 8 Statistics and Temporality 231
1 The Use and Misuse of Statistics and Probability: A Brief Review 231
a Misinterpretations in Medicine and Biology 232
b Correlation and Causation 236
Retrospective and Prospective Studies 236
Correlation (Strong or Weak) Does Not Mean Causality 238
c The Analysis of Variance and the Endless Debate about the Innate versus the Acquired 240
Heritability Is Not a Measure of Genetic Influence 241
The Hypothesis of Additivity 242
2 Paradoxes of the Possible and Probabilities: Time versus Eternity 244
a The Monty Hall Problem, or Marilyn and the Goats 244
b Fermat's Strictures and Pascal's "Mistakes": Equal Odds When Throwing Dice 248
3 Beliefs and Waters 254
Chapter 9 Memory of Ritual, Metaphor of Fertilization 257
1 To Remember and Not Forget 257
2 Generations 260
3 Past and Future: The Conversive Vav 261
4 The Origins 263
5 New Years, Memory, and Fertilization 267
6 The Time of Ritual: Conceiving a Memory 269
7 "The Vision and Riddle" … that "the Mouth Cannot Utter and the Ear Cannot Hear" 270
8 Underground History or Carnival? 273
Part 5 The Letter of the Spirit
Chapter 10 The So-Called Chosen People … 279
1 A False Start: The Antisemitic Question 279
2 The Treason of Words and Their Improper Usage 282
3 What Does the Bible Say? 285
4 A Chosen People Like All the Others 287
5 There Is Nothing Special about the Essence of the People of Israel 290
6 Creating "Chosen Souls" 292
7 Understanding Another Imaginary 294
8 Where Is the Confusion? 297
9 The Election of "the Smallest of Peoples" 298
10 "Atheist" Theologies 300
11 The Tribe and the Humanity in Each Individual 300
12 A Tribal God in the Wilderness 302
13 Telecommunications to the Planetary God 303
14 Neither "Race" nor "Chosen People" … 305
15 The Question of the State 306
Chapter 11 Maimonides then and Now 309
1 Science and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century 309
2 The Bodily Forms of God 310
3 The Face or Category of "In Front Of" 312
4 "The Eyes of YHWH" 313
5 Generosity and Rigor 315
6 Speculative Kabbalah and Modernity 317
7 Seeing and Speaking 318
8 Philosophy and Prophecy 320
9 "Practical Faith" 323
10 The Idolatry of History 327
Chapter 12 Levels of Meaning and the Atheism of Scripture 329
1 The Crowns on the Letters 329
2 The Meanings of a Bottle Found in the Ocean 331
3 The "Garden" and Its Four Levels 335
a Peshat: The Literal, Plain, or Obvious Sense 337
b Remez: The Allusive Meaning 337
c Derash: The "Allegorical" Meaning 339
d The Hermeneutic Situation: Absence Postulated a Priori 341
e Sod: The Hidden or Esoteric Sense 341
4 The White Space in the Text 344
5 The Name and Its Interpretations 346
6 Words of God and the Atheism of Scripture 348
Sources 353
Index 355
