Thinking Impossibilities: The Intellectual Legacy of Amos Funkenstein

by Robert S. Westman (Editor), David Biale (Editor)

Overview

Intellectuals rarely make a significant impact on one field of scholarship let alone several, yet Amos Funkenstein (1937-1995) displayed an intellectual range that encompassed several disciplines and broke new ground across seemingly impenetrable scholarly boundaries. The philosophy of history from antiquity to modernity, medieval and early modern history of science, medieval scholasticism, Jewish history in all of its periods - these are all areas in which he made lasting contributions. Thinking Impossibilities brings together Funkenstein's colleagues, friends, and former students to engage with important aspects of his intellectual legacy.

Funkenstein's diverse interests were bound together by common figures of thought, especially the search for pre-modern intellectual groundings of modern ideas and how the seeming 'impossibilities' of one historical moment might become positive resources of conceptual construction and development in another. The essays in this volume take up major themes in European intellectual history, and examine them through the unique lens that Funkenstein himself employed during his career. Of particular interest are ways in which topics of Jewish history are engaged with the larger field of the history of ideas in the West. Richly interdisciplinary and full of fresh insights, Thinking Impossibilities is a fitting tribute to an important twentieth-century scholar.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781442692633
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	05/24/2008
Series:	UCLA Clark Memorial Library Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Robert S. Westman is Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego.
David Biale is the Emanuel Ringelblum Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     vii
Preface     ix
Introduction: The Last German-Jewish Philosopher: An Intellectual Biography of Amos Funkenstein   David Biale   Robert S. Westman     3
Historical Dialectics
Divine Omnipotence and First Principles: A Late Medieval Argument on the Subalternation of the Sciences   Steven Livesey     13
Was Kepler a Secular Theologian?   Robert S. Westman     34
Jewish Traditionalism and Early Modern Science: Rabbi Israel Zamosc's Dialectic of Enlightenment (Berlin, 1744)   Gad Freudenthal     63
Religion, Theology, and the Hermetic Imagination in the Late German Enlightenment: The Case of Johann Salomo Semler   Peter Hanns Reill     97
Science and the Musical Imagination from the Late Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period   Dorit Tanay     112
Historical Accommodations
Amos Funkenstein on the Theological Origins of Historicism   Samuel Moyn     143
Of Divine Cunning and Prolonged Madness: Amos Funkenstein on Maimonides' Historical Reasoning   Abraham P. Socher     167
History and/or Memory: The Origins of the Principle of Accommodation   Carlo Ginzburg     193
Historical Consciousness Revisited: From Vico's Mythology to Funkenstein's Methodology   Joseph Mali     207
Francesco Bianchini, Historian. In Memory of Amos Funkenstein   J.L. Heilbron     227
Making Knowledge
Amos Funkenstein and the History of Scepticism   Richard H. Popkin     281
Two Talmudic Understandings of the Dictum 'Appoint for Yourself a Teacher'   Hanina Ben-Menahem     288
Last Words
Jewish History among the Thorns   Amos Funkenstein     309
A Bibliography of the Published Works of Amos Funkenstein     328
Contributors     339
Index     343

Editorial Reviews

'This volume presents a collection of fine and thought provoking papers... An extremely inspiring and sophisticated volume, Thinking Possibilities provokes thoughts about the manifold possibilities hidden within it - and this is not only what the title promises, but also what a volume can and should achieve.'—Veronika Lipphardt, Metascience, vol 19:02:2010

From the Publisher

'This volume presents a collection of fine and thought provoking papers... An extremely inspiring and sophisticated volume, Thinking Possibilities provokes thoughts about the manifold possibilities hidden within it - and this is not only what the title promises, but also what a volume can and should achieve.'

Metascience, vol 19:02:2010 - Veronika Lipphardt