Jean Elshtain: Why Augustine and Arendt?

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (03) ◽  
pp. 578-586 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Binding Agent ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Christian Political Thought ◽  
Vexed Question

Jean Elshtain appeared in my life at a fortuitous moment in the early 1980s as I ventured into unexplored academic terrain—the vexed question of what Hannah Arendt intended by engaging with Christian political thought, particularly the work of the fifth-century bishop and theologian Aurelius Augustine. She was already a notoriously maverick Jewish writer on the Holocaust. What could be made of Arendt's regard for her “old friend” Augustine? A previous discovery—the fact that she had written her dissertation on the theme of love (caritas) as the binding agent in civil society—had led me to the Library of Congress in 1983 where the original 1929 German manuscript is housed, together with the English translation Arendt had begun in New York in 1958. Neither had been published. I proposed a paper on the subject for the APSA meeting in Washington in 1984, fully expecting a negative response, given the deviation from the norm of Arendt scholarship it entailed. Instead I was contacted directly by Elshtain who let me know that she found this new aspect of Arendt's writing very significant and wanted to hear more about it on the Arendt-themed panel that she was organizing and chairing. I knew her work but had never met or corresponded with her. I was, needless to say, surprised and grateful.

scholarly journals Outline of an Introduction to Mathematical Logic I

1958 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-54
Author(s):  
Abraham Robinson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Mathematical Logic ◽  
English Translation ◽  
First Order ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Formed Part

This is the first of (presumably) three articles on the subject mentioned in the title. The exposition is based on a course of fifteen lectures which formed part of the Edmonton (1957) Seminar of the Canadian Mathematical Congress. Limitations of space (and, originally, of time) compel us to be selective in two directions. First, while we shall refer to other branches of logic in passing, we shall be concerned principally with the two fundamental calculi - of propositions and of predicates (of the first order). Thus, except for a number of modern developments which are included here, our exposition will be similar in scope, though not in detail, to the first and third chapters of the well-known "Principles of Mathematical Logic" by D. Hilbert and W. Ackermann (English translation, Chelsea, New York, 1950) and this was in fact the recommended text for the Edmonton course. However, there exists a growing number of other good introductions to the field and some of these will be listed later.

Hegel's Ethical Thought

1992 ◽  
Vol 13 (01) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Houlgate
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Major Elements ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Philosophy Of Right ◽  
Practical Dimension

It is often assumed that Hegel's philosophy contains no practical dimension, no doctrine of how human beings should live, but is concerned exclusively with showing that human existence, as the product of reason, is already fully rational. As a consequence, even though Hegel's social and political thought (which is set out mainly in his Philosophy of Right) has been the subject of extensive and detailed study over the years, few commentators have ever tried to develop a Hegelian ethical theory to place alongside those of Aristotle, Kant and Mill. In his book, Hegel's Ethical Thought, Allen Wood has set himself the task of remedying this situation and, in my view, has succeeded in producing one of the most thoughtful, informative and provocative accounts of Hegel's Philosophy of Right to date. Wood's achievement is extraordinary. He offers a coherent and sophisticated account of virtually all the major elements of Hegelian “objective spirit”, including freedom, happiness, recognition, right, property, punishment, morality, conscience, civil society, poverty, the state and history; and in the process he engages Hegel in a fascinating and highly instructive dialogue with a whole host of thinkers, including Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Fichte, J F Fries and J S Mill, in a way that exceedingly few commentators have succeeded in doing (or have even tried to do). As a result, I believe that Wood has shown conclusively that Hegel is an ethical theorist who is every bit as sophisticated as Aristotle, Kant and Mill, and whose contribution to ethical theory can no longer continue to be disparaged or ignored (as is largely the case) by contemporary students of the subject.

A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling

1999 ◽  
pp. 358-362
Author(s):  
David G. Roskies
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Yiddish Literature ◽  
Old World ◽  
Isaac Bashevis Singer ◽  
Primary Function ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Subject

This chapter presents David G. Roskies's book, A Bridge of Longing. The book focuses on Yiddish literature and Roskies's views on the subject. According to him, the book is ‘all about loss and reinvention’. Yiddish literature, born of a tremendous desire by authors and readers alike to challenge and to meet challenge, has come to be perhaps uniquely susceptible to a certain tendency for wishful reading. Written by and for the ‘millionaires of individuality’, as Isaac Bashevis Singer called the Yiddish-speaking Jews, published in weekly instalments in dozens of competing newspapers and in impressive numbers of book copies, read and discussed everywhere from Kiev to New York, Yiddish literature yet saw its primary function shrink after the Holocaust. It became a mere make-believe repository of tradition, a storehouse of serviceable myths about the Old World, an attic full of humour samples and bedtime stories. Few have come to the rescue of Yiddish in the last several decades, hence the chapter presents Roskies as one of the small coterie of post-Holocaust Yiddishists worthy of reading.

Rebellious Civil Society: Popular Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland, 1989–1993. By Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. 296p. $22.95. Framing Democracy: Civil Society and Civic Movements in Eastern Europe. By John K. Glenn, III. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. 289p. $45.00. Creating a Democratic Civil Society in Eastern Germany: The Case of the Citizen Movements and Alliance 90. By Christiane Olivo. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 293p. $55.00.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 848-850
Author(s):  
Andrei S. Markovits
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Societal Change ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Ann Arbor ◽  
The Subject

A decade after the epochal events of the late 1980s and early 1990s, we have come to see them not as quasi miracles the way we did then but almost as prosaic way stations in the ever-present process of societal change. To be sure, there has been a stream of often pathbreaking scholarship in the fields of comparative politics and political sociology, with a special emphasis on social movements, civil society, the transition from authoritarian to democratic societies, and the complex consolidation of the latter that has rightly contributed to the demystification of these events. Yet, as citizens as well as scholars, we still remain so riveted by what happened in those few years in East Central Europe that the point of diminishing returns potentially afflicting additional research and writing on the subject remains distant.

‘Where Men and Gods Command’: the monument, the crypt, and the magic word

Derrida Today ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-98
Author(s):  
Thomas Houlton
Keyword(s):  
The Holocaust ◽  
Memory Power ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Exquisite Corpse ◽  
Physical Manifestation

This paper examines the relationships between monumental commemoration and memory, placing Rachel Whiteread's Memorial to the Austrian Jewish Victims of the Shoah (2000) as the physical manifestation of Derrida's archive as a place where memory, power, writing and representation intersect. I consider the context and characteristics of Whiteread's memorial alongside the concept of the crypt, formulated by Derrida in his ‘Fors’ to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's The Wolf Man's Magic Word (1976). I propose that the archive, formed as it as around the crypt, is a place where death and desire co-habit, and that the Holocaust, the subject of Whiteread's sculpture, is itself an archive that has been constructed around what Maria Torok terms the ‘exquisite corpse’. This exquisite corpse of the Holocaust encrypts, even in its own commemoration, the erotics and desires of the ‘Nazi father’ or ‘Hitler in uns’, what Derrida terms ‘the tombstone of the illicit’. This paper poses the question that we are, even as we remember the Jewish dead, simultaneously re-encrypting the forgetful, murderous Nazi father, and advocates that we maintain a watchfulness on the threshold of the archive, the monument, the text, in order to resist total resolution, complete meaning, the forgetful re-inscription of acts of atrocity.

Sūrat Maryam (Q. 19): Lexicon, Lexical Echoes, English Translation

2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shawkat M. Toorawa
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Comparative Religion ◽  
Individual Treatment ◽  
General Consensus ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Interfaith Community ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Q. 19 (Sūrat Maryam) – an end-rhyming, and, by general consensus, middle to late Meccan sura of 98 (or 99) verses – has been the subject of considerable exegetical and scholarly attention. Besides commentary, naturally, in every tafsīr of the Qur'an, Sura 19 has also benefited from separate, individual treatment. It has been the object of special attention by modern Western scholars, in particular those of comparative religion and of Christianity, whose attention has centred largely on the virtue and piety of Mary, on the miraculous nature of the birth of Jesus, on Jesus' ministry, and on how Jesus' time on Earth came to an end. In addition, Sura 19 is a favourite of the interfaith community. Given this sustained and multivectored scrutiny, it is remarkable how little analysis has been devoted to its lexicon. This article is a contribution to the study of the lexicon of this sura, with a particular emphasis on three features: rhyming end words, hapaxes, and repeating words and roots, some of which occur in this sura alone.

“The heart above the ruins”: Miriam Waddington’s Poetry, the Spanish Civil War, and Jewish Canadian Literature

1969 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Robins Sharpe
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Canadian Literature ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Subject ◽  
War Consequences

The Jewish Canadian writer Miriam Waddington returned repeatedly to the subject of the Spanish Civil War, searching for hope amid the ruins of Spanish democracy. The conflict, a prelude to World War II, inspired an outpouring of literature and volunteerism. My paper argues for Waddington’s unique poetic perspective, in which she represents the Holocaust as the Spanish Civil War’s outgrowth while highlighting the deeply personal repercussions of the war – consequences for women, for the earth, and for community. Waddington’s poetry connects women’s rights to human rights, Canadian peace to European war, and Jewish persecution to Spanish carnage.

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