Virtuous Prophets

This chapter examines the roles and characters of individual prophets in Origen’s writing. Origen distinguishes clearly and consistently across his works between prophesying and being a prophet. While there are cases both from the Old Testament and the New Testament—including Balaam and Caiaphas—of non-prophets who make divinely inspired and beneficial prophecies, Origen is clear that there is a threshold of personal virtue that a person has to cross to be considered a true prophet. Origen does not explicitly lay out the conditions for morally judging a prophecy or a prophet, but in this chapter a tripartite set of criteria is suggested: whether somebody is a prophet must be judged against a) the personal virtue of a prophet (the virtue criterion), b) the morality of their inspiration, through God rather than through demons (the inspiration criterion) and c) the benefit of their prophecies for other people, both contemporaries and in the future (the benefit criterion). None of these criteria explicitly address prophetic ecstasy, and while Origen is mildly disapproving of ecstasy, he does not consider it important. These criteria for judging prophets were not developed in a vacuum, but rely upon both Greek pagan and Philonic understandings of ecstasy, inspiration, and personal virtue. The chapter ends with a demonstration of the supreme virtue and moral-pedagogical role of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Moses in Origen’s thought.

Introduction

Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics features new work in the field of normative ethical theory. This tenth volume features chapters on the following topics: defending deontology, justice as a personal virtue, willful ignorance and moral responsibility, moral obligation and epistemic risk, the so-called numbers problem in ethics, rule consequentialism, moral worth, respect and rational agency, a Kantian solution to the trolley problem, virtue and character, and the limits of virtue ethics....

Book Review: Rav Sa‘adya Ga’on in the focus of controversies in Baghdad

On the occasion of Professor Joshua Blau’s centenary jubilee, the book Rav Sa‘adya Ga’on in the focus of controversies in Baghdad: Sa'adya’s Sefer Ha-Galuy and Mevasser's two books of critiques on him, by Joshua Blau himself and Joseph Yahalom, was published in 2019 by the Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East of Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The book includes the original Hebrew version of Sefer Ha-Galuy; Sefer Eppiqoros, by Khalaf ibn Sarjadu; The Arabic version (Tafsir) of Sefer Ha-Galuy; and two critical works by by Mevasser ben Nissi Halevi: The Book of Correcting the Errors Found in the Writings of the Fayyumite Rosh Yeshiva, and The Book of Revealing the Errors Found in the Writings of the Fayyumite Rosh Yeshiva. I briefly review the content of these works as well as the cultural and historical background, and focus on the reasons for which Rav Sa‘adya composed Sefer Ha-Galuy and the ten benefits he detailed which may be gained from his work. We stress additional insights that the modern reader may find in this work, among them a glimpse into Rav Sa‘adya’s methodology in his Biblical commentary as reflected in his usage of biblical words in Sefer Ha-Galuy. We also discuss the history of the publication of Sefer Ha-Galuy throughout the past century and a half, little by little, until the nearly complete edition by Blau and Yahalom. The newly published translation reads fluently and is enlightening, bringing the reader into the atmosphere of those distant days. The reconstruction of the manuscript from the Geniza fragments is mostly plausible, but seems to be incorrect in a few places. I present here three additional yet unpublished fragments of the Sefer Ha-Galuy that include sections not included in the new printed edition, and suggest that some of the printed sections should be reordered. In addition, considerations regarding the internal coherency of the text, as well as the physical properties of the Geniza fragments, may lead to a slightly different ordering. One of the newly presented fragments reveals that in his commentary on the Sefer Ha-Galuy Rav Sa‘adya aimed at demonstrating the utility of high mathematics to Torah study, thereby emphasizing his own personal virtue as one having extensive knowledge in these fields. Furthermore, one can learn from the new Geniza sections about the proper order in which Rav Sa‘adya mentions the people whom he attacks in this manuscript, including a name that has disappeared so far from the eyes of the researchers, Judah the son of the Exilarch, David Ben Zakkai. The edition is accompanied by brief expansive comments. I illustrate how these may be the basis for further discussions, addressing the calculation of the end-of-days included in Sefer Ha-Galuy, probably as part of Rav Sa‘adya's method of historiography, which divides Jewish history into periods of 500 years.

A New Type of Evolutionary Strategy Based on a Multi-player Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Game

According to the philosophy of self-cultivation that “one should refine his personal virtue when in poverty, and help save the world when in success”, a new type of evolutionary strategy, Poor-Competition-Rich-Cooperation (PCRC), is proposed. To discuss its superiority and inferiority, based on a multi-player iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game, PCRC and other six kinds of strategies are played by using the roulette method in three different populations (a uniformly distributed population, a cooperation-preference population, a defection-preference population). The payoff characteristics for each strategy under different temptation coefficients and noise values are also analyzed. Simulation results indicate that PCRC has a sufficient robustness and its payoff presents a basically monotonic increasing tendency with the increment of noise. The superiority of PCRC becomes more obvious when the temptation coefficient becomes larger. Furthermore, a higher population preference for defection yields a more obvious advantage for PCRC.

A Jewish Family in 19th Century Memoirs: New Russian Christians of Jewish Descent

In the article, I juxtapose the memoirs written at the turn of 20th century by new Russian Christians of Jewish descent, Alexander Alexeev (Wulf Nakhlas) and Arkadii Kovner. At the heart of these texts are memories of childhood, youth and family. Concentrated around personal experiences of the Jewish past, the memoirs differ significantly in their tone. Alexander Alexeev, a devoted Christian and missionary, tailors his plot as a straight road towards the Orthodox Christian faith and Russia. Arkadii Kovner, a formal Christian and strong atheist, is making a claim for the Russian Jewish community as well as for himself as a Jew. Differently tuned, both narratives create a vision of the Jewish families as a world filled with deep sentiment and love. The Jewish families are a true cradle for personal virtue and intellectual growth, even for a Christian or ultra-progressive freethinker.

The Virtue of Justice and the Justice of Institutions

Justice, according to Thomas Aquinas, is a personal virtue. Modern theorists, by contrast, generally treat justice as a virtue of social institutions. Jean Porter rightly argues that both perspectives are necessary. But how should we conceive the relationship between the virtue of justice and the justice of institutions? I address this question by drawing from Aquinas’s account of the role of the convention of money in mediating relations of just exchange. Developing Aquinas’s account, I defend two conclusions and raise one problem. The conclusions are: (1) Aquinas does presuppose the need for just institutions in just relations; (2) Aquinas highlights the importance of an underappreciated consideration: the way institutions mediate just or unjust relationships. The problem, which naturally arises from bringing together the virtue of justice and the justice of institutions, is whether and how individuals can act justly in a context of structural injustice.

Sketching the Christian Self in the New Testament Writings

This chapter considers the representation of personhood and agency in the New Testament, as matters that frame Christian conceptions of personal virtue, in general, and intellectual humility, specifically. It is particularly attentive to the ways in which the New Testament represents the Christian self as constituted by another, by the determinative personhood of Jesus Christ, operating through the Holy Spirit. The account is necessarily Trinitarian and necessarily communal: the personhood of Jesus is determinative for the identity of all Christians, who are thereby represented as a unity, as his body, sharing in ‘the mind of Christ’ through the work of the Spirit, and thereby relating properly to God. Crucially, too, this chapter highlights that Christocentric identity is essentially ‘disrupted’ and, as such, opened to new ways of considering reality and acting within it. Properly understood, this generates both epistemic and volitional humility.

Legislating the Personal Virtue of Justice

This chapter addresses the prospect of using law as a tool to inculcate the personal or individual virtue of justice. Such a project arguably falls under the rubric of “virtue jurisprudence,” so the first task in this chapter is to situate the emerging virtue jurisprudence within the landscape of normative legal theory. There follows a discussion of three major challenges that would face any efforts to use the law to make people just—most notably the claim that the legislative virtue inculcation project might violate our shared liberal commitments to autonomy. Finally, the chapter highlights some of the ways to conceptualize the legislative virtue inculcation project to make it less objectionable to possible critics.