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Little has been written about the attitudes of medieval Jewish philosophers towards the phenomenon of women prophets. Among the qualities essential for a prophet, medieval philosophers highlighted intellectual perfection as the foremost prerequisite. At the same time, these philosophers generally labeled women as intellectually deficient by definition. Consequently, the axiomatic equation of a prophet with a philosopher generated an apparently unresolvable problem in the case of women prophets. Within these constraints, medieval philosophers still had to confront the question of women prophets, as the Hebrew Bible emphatically pointed at three of its heroines—Miriam, Deborah, and Huldah—as among those through whom God had chosen to speak. This article deals with the surprising treatment of the issue by central representatives of medieval Jewish thought.

Scholars who examine the possible influence of scholastic writers on Crescas' treatment of the existence of multiple worlds have thus far focused on Nicole Oresme's Latin and French works. It is proposed here that Crescas may have been influenced by Thomas Aquinas' treatment of the multiple worlds. More specifically, Crescas' first two arguments for the existence of multiple worlds, presented in the fourth treatise of Or Hashem, are compared with Aquinas' arguments in his quaestio on the issue in the Summa Theologica. Given that these arguments share a common structure and appear in the same order in both works, it is plausible that Crescas relied on by Aquinas. The differences between them can be explained largely by Crescas' desire to adapt Aquinas' proofs to suit his own treatment of creation.

In this paper I analyze Heschel's activity in the civil rights movement, specifically, his marching in Selma and the famous lines he wrote after, “I felt my legs praying.” In order to fully comprehend this statement we must reexamine his thought in relation to Jewish mysticism. Heschel's attitude towards Jewish mysticism has largely been discussed through the understanding of this field by Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem. A deeper phenomenological reading of Heschel's thought is available by utilizing Elliot Wolfson's view of Jewish mysticism. Drawing on Wolfson's research, I elucidate Heschel's view of God, man, and language. Following these topics, I discuss Heschel's understanding of prayer and prophecy and demonstrate that according to Heschel they are two sides of the same phenomenon. Finally, I present Heschel's “hyperpolitical” activity and the mystical element in his protest.

Much scholarly effort has been devoted to the editorial process that produced the corpus of R. Abraham Isaac ha-Kohen Kook. Understandably, the editorial techniques of R. Zvi Yehudah Kook—the only son of R. Kook—have received particular attention due the formative role he had in editing and publishing his father's writings. R. Zvi Yehudah's editorial activities with his father's works include the brief essay “La-Milhemet ha-Deot ve-ha-Emunot” (The Battle of Opinions and Beliefs), published in 1913. It has been argued that in his editing of this essay, he attempted to minimize R. Kook's legitimation of secular Zionists. I suggest a different understanding of the underlying motivation of R. Zvi Yehudah. He was attempting to provide a response of R. Kook to the most significant literary and cultural controversy that occupied the Zionist and Hebrew literary landscape, namely, the Brenner affair. R. Zvi Yehudah, through his editing of “La-Milhemet ha-Deot ve-ha-Emunot,” was interested in grounding R. Kook's writings in the historical and social context in which they were composed. During the Jaffe period, R. Zvi Yehudah aggressively redacted various pages from his notebook and shaped the essay in order to relate R. Kook's work to one of the most significant cultural and ideological Zionist debates of his time and to bring his writings in conversation with his contemporaries and colleagues.

This paper attempts to treat Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico Politicus in the context of recent work on 'political Hebraism'. First it examines the role of the ancient historian Flavius Josephus in the general context of political Hebraism, and then it discusses his place in Spinoza's writings more specifically. The argument attempts to show that a particular mode of reading Josephus ('Josephism') emerged in the political Hebraist tradition, and that Spinoza may be seen as both the end of this tradition and a sophisticated critic of it. The conclusion reached suggests that Spinoza's radical ideas about the method of political inquiry and the role of reason therein made him a natural and necessary opponent even of such relatively liberal thinkers as the 'Josephists'.

A major trend that characterized the naturalization of the Aristotelian habitus concept in the medieval Islamic world was its application to religious discourses. This trend was not limited to the works of Muslim thinkers. The present communication focuses on the ways in which Maimonides used the concept, naturalizing it in the religious Jewish system.

Warren Zev Harvey wrote a bold and now famous paper over thirty years ago entitled “A Portrait of Spinoza as a Maimonidean,” defending the dominant influence of the philosophy of the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides on the thought of Baruch Spinoza. However, since then, he further developed his thesis by publishing numerous articles showing that Spinoza was not only developing the ideas of Maimonides, but also was unique in synthesizing many different competing strands within medieval Jewish philosophy more generally, including those of Abraham Ibn Ezra, Levi Gersonides, and Hasdai Crescas. In other words, one can even be a Maimonidean by adapting the views of Maimonides's critics who nonetheless continued his philosophic legacy within the discourse that he began. While the thought and character of Baruch Spinoza has been continually scrutinized and reinterpreted in every generation since his death, I argue that Harvey's emphasis on the diversity of Jewish sources within Spinoza's thought aims to be a model for a political liberalism that is rooted within the texts of the Jewish tradition, while also one that advocates an intellectual pluralism.

The application of digital humanities techniques to philosophy is changing the way scholars approach the discipline. This paper seeks to open a discussion about the difficulties, methods, opportunities, and dangers of creating and utilizing a formal representation of the discipline of philosophy. We review our current project, the Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) project, which uses a combination of automated methods and expert feedback to create a dynamic computational ontology for the discipline of philosophy. We argue that our distributed, expert-based approach to modeling the discipline carries substantial practical and philosophical benefits over alternatives. We also discuss challenges facing our project (and any other similar project) as well as the future directions for digital philosophy afforded by formal modeling.