Rabbi Spinoza:
Baruch Spinoza as a Jewish Bible Commentator

Yitzhak Y. Melamed is the Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He works on Early Modern Philosophy, German Idealism, Medieval Philosophy, and some issues in contemporary metaphysics, and is the author of Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought (Oxford 2013), and Spinoza’s Labyrinths (Oxford, forthcoming). Currently, he is working on the completion of a book on Spinoza and German Idealism, and on an introduction to Spinoza’s philosophy. His research has been featured in BBC (The World Tonight), LeMond, Ha’aretz, Kan Tarbut (Israeli Cultural Radio).

This talk traces the influence of Spinoza’s early Rabbinic schooling on his writing from the period after he left the Jewish community. It argues that Spinoza is frequently unaware of the formative role of his early Rabbinic education, and that he commonly reads the Bible through Rabbinic eyes without the least being conscious of this fact. If this argument is cogent, it would seem that much more attention should be paid to Spinoza’s early education.

 

Acosmism: Hassidism’s Gift to the Jews… and the World
Sunday, April 7th, 2024 | 4:00 pm
Bard Graduate Center Lecture Hall, 38 West 86 street, New York, NY, 10024

This paper argues that the most significant Jewish contribution to modern Western philosophy - the notion of acosmism, according to which only God truly and fully exists - originated in early Hassidism. I will show that through the mediation of Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) this bold notion was adopted from the school of the Maggid of Mezhrich and introduced into the systems of German Idealism.
Free and open to the public.

Register for event here: https://forms.gle/P2qJ6vkciD74e8du6