Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (1991)

Though written in what now feels like an entirely different epoch, this carefully argued book addresses a problem that still plagues us. Since the 1950s, more and more of our politics has been defined and argued over in terms of individual rights, which ostensibly are absolute, inhere in solitary rights-bearers, and imply no corresponding responsibilities. As a result, Glendon argues, complexity gives way to black-or-white thinking, legal conflict over these all-or-nothing stakes replaces compromise, and politics as the art of negotiation withers. The emphasis on hyperindividualistic rights fostered in our legal system subsequently shapes talk - and thought - in politics and everyday life. Occasionally the book addresses cultural and social changes, for example, the decline of civil society organizations. But mainly Glendon focuses on the early modern philosophical origins of rights talk and, especially, on the decisions of prominent American jurists. British and American law first deviated from continental law in this regard when Hobbes and Locke painted pictures of monadic individuals asserting their rights, while Rousseau retained more of the classical and Biblical traditions that had always paired responsibilities with rights. This distinction was wholly new to me. A further step on the American path to hyperindividualist conceptions of rights was taken by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who argued that law has no basis in morality. An especially valuable part of the book are Glendon's detailed comparisons of American and European or Canadian rulings on issues such as abortion or the legal duty to come to the aid of strangers. Rights Talk nicely complements the work of Michael Sandel, whom Glendon acknowledges as an influence, and other communitarian thinkers.

Moshe Halbertal, Maimonides: Life and Thought (2014)

I knew very little about Maimonides when I started this intellectual biography - basically, only that he was somewhat akin to people like Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Thomas Aquinas in that they all sought to integrate their religious faiths with Aristotelian philosophy. By the time I was finished with Maimonides, I was, to put it in technical terms, blown away by him. His intellectual audacity was breathtaking. As a type, he reminded me of Max Weber. John Leizman, a colleague at Bard, compared him to Aristotle himself. Maimonides' first major project was a codification of all of halakhah, the great, overflowing and, by design, contentious corpus of Jewish law encompassing the Mishnah and the Talmud. Maimonides aspired to put an end to the contention by codifying and, in a sense, replacing that corpus. This work - Mishneh Torah- drew extensively on Aristotelian ideas. His other great project, however, The Guide for the Perplexed, more directly addressed the challenge of integrating Torah and philosophy. However, unlike the Mishneh Torah, the Guide addressed an elite audience and concealed its radicalism, making it an esoteric text. Halbertal skillfully guides the reader through the theological and philosophical questions Maimonides wrestled with. The decisive question pertained to God's will and God's wisdom. Emphasizing the former meant that God created the world ex nihilo, intervened purposefully and repeatedly in history, etc. This fitted the traditional, and arguably self-evident, interpretation of the Bible. Contrary to it, however, Maimonides's revolutionary theology focused on the wisdom of God, which implied that the world had existed eternally, God did not intervene, God's wisdom could be found in the orderliness of nature, etc. In short, this was a nearly wholesale reinterpration of Judaism in light of Aristotle's thought. Even prophecy and personal salvation were reinterpreted as natural accomplishments. What made Maimonides's project all the more remarkable were the conditions in which he lived and worked. He and his family fled al-Andalus in the middle of the 12th century, upon the seizure of power by the relatively intolerant Almohads. Unlike many Andalusian Jews, who fled to Provence, Maimonides fled first toward the Almohad power center in the Maghrib. Eventually, they settled in Cairo. Maimonides had lost the safety and familiarity of Cordoba and had to make due as a refugee. To accomplish such a revolutionary rethinking of an entire tradition under such conditions is truly remarkable.

Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (1997)

This is a pithy, profound book. In its 130 pages, Halbertal traces the evolving nature of the "rabbinic revolution," which roughly 2000 years ago replaced the priest and prophet with the rabbi and book. In Weberian fashion he distinguishes different species of a common genus - whether canon, meaning, the hermeneutic principle of charity, Kabbalah, esotericism, etc. First came the Bible, of course; but then came the Mishnah and the Talmud, both of which were open-ended, polyphonic, and contentious - the first a collection of legal rulings, the second a discussion of them. The Talmud in particular displaced the Torah as the central text of this text-centered community. In the middle ages, philosophy and Kabbalah (mysticism) each claimed to complement the Talmud. As I was reading about these intense efforts in hermeneutics and legal reasoning, I found myself wondering about the interaction between Jewish and Christian thinking, especially after, say, 1000, when Christian efforts to revive Roman law and to integrate Christianity with Aristotelian philosophy began? Were these Christian and the similar Jewish efforts Halbertal describes merely running in parallel, or was there cross-fertilization between them? My guess would be that any influence there might have been went only one way, from the Christian to the Jewish - simply because I don't believe the dominant Christian thinkers took much interest in the tiny Jewish minority, at least not until the Reformation. But I may be wrong. In any case, this is not a question Halbertal here addresses. The focus is on the evolution of Jewish texts and text-centeredness, but there are all sorts of connections to fundamental questions of interpretation, religious evolution in general, the meeting of cultures (Judaism and Greek philosophy in the middle ages), etc. The second I finished this book, I started Halbertal's intellectual biography of Maimonides, which looks to be superb as well.....

Menachem Fisch, Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture (1997)

I can't recall exactly how I came to this book. It may have been that by familiarizing myself (a little) with Scholasticism and medieval Muslim explorations of the relationship between revelation and reason, on the one hand, and having some superficial impressions of what I understood to be a Talmudic culture of debate about Biblical interpretation, on the other, I began to wonder just what this Jewish tradition was like, and whether it, perhaps, bore some similarities to the Christian and Muslim scholasticisms. I may have been intrigued, I can't really remember, by the possibility that a tradition had developed a critical tradition on its own, largely without the "outside" impetus of Greek philosophy. I hoped Fisch's book might provide an intellectual prosopography of this tradition. In fact, it was rather different than I had expected, but nonetheless still fascinating. In the first, much shorter part, Fisch, an eminent philosopher of science in his own right, developed a kind of meta-Popperian account of rational projects, a standard independent of the projects' goals. I found this part to be quite persuasive. In the second, much longer, and for me quite challenging part, Fisch tried to show that Talmudic texts contained both traditionalist and antitraditionalist - i.e. critical in the meta-Popperian sense - strands. The persuasiveness of this part I really couldn't judge. The material was simply too dense, and I didn't have the patience to try to follow Fisch's argumentation. So I can't say how rational the rabbis were, though I want to think that Fisch is correct. I did come away struck by just how much of the Talmud dealt with "halahkik" questions, very specific issues of ritual law.