scholarly journals Hermann Cohen, Maimonides, and the Jewish Virtue of Humility

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Erlewine

AbstractThis paper explores Hermann Cohen’s engagement with, and appropriation of, Maimonides to refute the common assumption that Cohen’s endeavor was to harmonize Judaism with Western culture. Exploring the changes of Cohen’s conception of humility from Ethik des reinen Willens to the Ethics of Maimonides and Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, this paper highlights the centrality of the collective Jewish mission to bear witness against the dominant order of Western civilization and philosophy in Cohen’s Jewish thought.

Author(s):  
Michael Zank

Hermann Cohen was the founder of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism and a major influence on twentieth-century Jewish thought. Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism) (1919) is widely credited with the renewal of Jewish religious philosophy. Cohen’s philosophy of Judaism is inextricably linked with his general philosophical position. But his system of critical idealism in logic, ethics, aesthetics and psychology did not originally include a philosophy of religion. The mainly Protestant Marburg School in fact regarded Cohen’s Jewish philosophy as an insufficient solution to the philosophical problem of human existence and to that of determining the role of religion in human culture. Thinkers who favoured a new, more existentialist approach in Jewish thought, however, saw Cohen’s introduction of religion into the system as a daring departure from the confines of philosophical idealism. Cohen identified the central Jewish contribution to human culture as the development of a religion that unites historical particularity with ethical universality. At the core of this religion of reason is the interdependence of the idea of God and that of the human being. Cohen derives this theme from the Jewish canon through a philosophical analysis based on his transcendental idealism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 398-412
Author(s):  
Z. A. Sokuler

The concept of virtue was of great interest and importance for H. Cohen. In the interpretation of this concept in his latest work “Religion of reason from the sources of Judaism” the most important concepts of this work were brought in the focus: the specificity of definition of what is the religion of reason; understanding of the uniqueness of God; correlation; messianism. For Cohen, a single system of virtues presupposes a single and unique ethics and correlates with the idea of the unity of humanity. The last concept, in his opinion, maturated in the fold of monotheism. Humanity is one, because all people are creations of the unique God. “Religion of reason” treats of the common universal virtues. In the religion of reason, the idea of God and morality are inextricably linked. Cohen rejects metaphysical speculation about the nature of God, about the attributes of God inherent in himself. The religion of the mind speaks of God only in correlation with man. God is a moral ideal and reveals himself to man by giving him moral commandments. Morality connects man and God, and this connection is revealed in detail by Cohen in the theme of virtues. Understanding God as Truth is important for the disclosure of this topic. The corresponding virtue for a person is faithfulness to truth, or truthfulness. In addition to truthfulness in the usual sense, for Cohen, faithfulness to truth requires correct worship of God. The correlation culminates in the idea of messianism, which is interpreted by Cohen as an endless movement of a whole humanity to the social justice.


2008 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-105
Author(s):  
Robert Dickson Crane

The vaunted clash of civilizations has grown into a Fourth World War of demonization against Islam. The newest strategy is to single out Islam’s essential values, deny that they exist, and assert that their absence constitutes the Islamic threat. This article shows the common identity of classical American and classical Islamic thought so that Muslims, Christians, and Jews can unite against religious extremism. Muslim jurisprudents developed the world’s most sophisticated code of human responsibilities and rights. This is now being revived as the common heritage of western civilization based on the premise that justice reflects a truth higher than man-made positivist law and on the corollary that the task of religion is to translate transcendent truth into the transcendent law of compassionate justice.


NASPA Journal ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jackie Clark ◽  
Joan Hirt

The creation of small communities has been proposed as a way of enhancing the educational experience of students at large institutions. Using data from a survey of students living in large and small residences at a public research university, this study does not support the common assumption that small-scale social environments are more conducive to positive community life than large-scale social environments.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 222
Author(s):  
Elaine M. Fisher

This article makes the case that Vīraśaivism emerged in direct textual continuity with the tantric traditions of the Śaiva Age. In academic practice up through the present day, the study of Śaivism, through Sanskrit sources, and bhakti Hinduism, through the vernacular, are generally treated as distinct disciplines and objects of study. As a result, Vīraśaivism has yet to be systematically approached through a philological analysis of its precursors from earlier Śaiva traditions. With this aim in mind, I begin by documenting for the first time that a thirteenth-century Sanskrit work of what I have called the Vīramāheśvara textual corpus, the Somanāthabhāṣya or Vīramāheśvarācārasāroddhārabhāṣya, was most likely authored by Pālkurikĕ Somanātha, best known for his vernacular Telugu Vīraśaiva literature. Second, I outline the indebtedness of the early Sanskrit and Telugu Vīramāheśvara corpus to a popular work of early lay Śaivism, the Śivadharmaśāstra, with particular attention to the concepts of the jaṅgama and the iṣṭaliṅga. That the Vīramāheśvaras borrowed many of their formative concepts and practices directly from the Śivadharmaśāstra and other works of the Śaiva Age, I argue, belies the common assumption that Vīraśaivism originated as a social and religious revolution.


Author(s):  
Clemens Buchen ◽  
Alberto Palermo

AbstractWe relax the common assumption of homogeneous beliefs in principal-agent relationships with adverse selection. Principals are competitors in the product market and write contracts also on the base of an expected aggregate. The model is a version of a cobweb model. In an evolutionary learning set-up, which is imitative, principals can have different beliefs about the distribution of agents’ types in the population. The resulting nonlinear dynamic system is studied. Convergence to a uniform belief depends on the relative size of the bias in beliefs.


2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomas Larsson

This article explains why massive political corruption appears to be incompatible with economic growth in Russia but compatible with very rapid economic growth in China. The common assumption is that corruption is bad for economic performance. So how can we explain the puzzling contrast between Russia and China? Is Russia being more severely “punished” for its corruption than China? If so, why? This article demonstrates that three intervening factors—comparative advantage, the organization of corruption, and the nature of rents—determines the impact of corruption on economic performance, and that these factors can explain the divergent outcomes. The article thereby offers an alternative to statist explanations of the Russia-China paradox.


1995 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jos M. Raaijmakers ◽  
Lentse van der Sluis ◽  
Peter A. H. M. Bakker ◽  
Bob Schippers ◽  
Margot Koster ◽  
...  

In this study, the potential of different Pseudomonas strains to utilize heterologous siderophores was compared with their competitiveness in the rhizosphere of radish. This issue was investigated in interactions between Pseudomonas putida WCS358 and Pseudomonas fluoresceins WCS374 and in interactions between strain WCS358 and eight indigenous Pseudomonas strains capable of utilizing pseudobactin 358. During four successive plant growth cycles of radish, strain WCS358 significantly reduced rhizosphere population densities of the wild-type strain WCS374 by up to 30 times, whereas derivative strain WCS374(pMR), harboring the siderophore receptor PupA for ferric pseudobactin 358, maintained its population density. Studies involving interactions between strain WCS358 and eight different indigenous Pseudomonas strains demonstrated that despite the ability of these indigenous isolates to utilize pseudobactin 358, their rhizosphere population densities were significantly reduced by strain WCS358 by up to 20 times. Moreover, rhizosphere colonization by WCS358 was not affected by any of these indigenous strains, even though siderophore-mediated growth inhibition of WCS358 by a majority of these strains was demonstrated in a plate bioassay. In conclusion, it can be stated that siderophore-mediated competition for iron is a major determinant in interactions between WCS358 and WCS374 in the rhizosphere. Moreover, our findings support the common assumption that cloning of siderophore receptor genes from one Pseudomonas strain into another can confer a competitive advantage in interactions in the rhizosphere. Interactions between WCS358 and the selected indigenous rhizosphere isolates, however, indicate that other traits also contribute to the rhizosphere competence of fluorescent Pseudomonas spp.Key words: siderophore, siderophore receptors, root colonization, fluorescent Pseudomonas.


Author(s):  
Melissa A. Fronzeo ◽  
Michael Kinzel ◽  
Jules Lindau

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is employed to study the fundamental aspects of the internal pressure within artificially ventilated, gaseous cavities in both twin- and toroidal-vortex closure modes. The results show that several pressure regions develop within the cavities, indicating that the common assumption that the cavity has a constant pressure breaks down when evaluated in high detail. The internal cavity pressure is evaluated using a probability density function (PDF). The resulting PDF plots show a clusters with multiple peaks. A mixture-of-Gaussians (MOG) method is employed to better understand the distributions of these peaks. These peaks are then mapped to the simulation results, where it is observed that these peaks correlate to distinct cavity regions (which vary depending on cavity type). Moreover, these varying pressure regions appear to align with cavity-radius growth and reduction and appear to be the driving force of the internal, circulatory flow. Lastly, the importance of these pressure regions are investigated with respect to predictions from semi-empirical theory of the cavity shape, showing a moderate impact depending on where the cavity is probed. Overall, these results provide physical insight into ventilated cavity flow behavior that is often ignored.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 1339-1343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Wagner ◽  
Joachim Ender

Air target recognition is a critical step in the radar processing chain and reliable features are necessary to make a decision. The number and position of jet engines are useful features to perform a pre-classification and give a list of possible targets. To extract these features, a sparse decomposition framework for inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) images is presented. With this framework different components of the target can be detected, if signal models for these parts are available. To use it for the detection of jet engines, a review of a signal model for air intakes, which was developed by Borden, is given. This model is based on the common assumption that the propagation of electromagnetic waves inside jet engines has the same dispersive behavior as inside waveguides. With this model a decomposition of a real ISAR image, measured with the tracking and imaging radar system of Fraunhofer FHR, into point-like scattering centers and jet engines is presented.


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