spelling issue

So here is something that I have been dealing with for a while, and I have to make a decision about, but I am torn. Any thoughts on this matter are appreciated.

Because of the way Yiddish phonology works, my last name is spelled with two ayyins in it (tzadi ayyin resh mem ayyin resh). My grandfather spells his name with two ayyins, as does one of his two sons. However, my generation is somewhat split. Some of us have dropped the ayyins in order to be in line with the Hebrew spelling (tzadi resh mem resh). The name, I believe, derives from a Yiddish word, so it makes sense to keep the Yiddish spelling. Though the Yiddish origins are a bit obscure. But I am not particularly fond of the Yiddish spelling, and when pronounced with ayyins as a Hebrew word, it sounds a bit bizarre. The word in Hebrew would be meaningless.


Keeping one ayyin as a compromise strikes me as a bit dumb, as it is the worst of both worlds.

I have no interest in actually changing the name, but I am torn over keeping or dropping the ayyins. Any thoughts?

. . . speaking of suing

Not sure how many of you remember the TV show "Sliders", but one scene has been coming to mind a lot lately. The crew lands in a world where some 91% of the population are lawyers and pretty much everyone sues everyone all the time. creepiness ensues.

Given our last post, we thought we had seen it all. But wait. . . middle aged Jewish guy sues thirty-something Asian girlfriend for dumping him. Given the fact that he did this, it is no wonder she left. He was nuts.

What is this world coming to? Obama, a lawyer, apparently believes that the function of the court is to make policy, and not enforce law. Maybe these people are hoping to find a left-wing recently dumped radical feminist judge who will award them money for being pathetic?

Why didn't I think of this

So a science studies professor freaks out at her students and calls them names because she is unable to convince them that her crazy ideas make sense. So she threatens to sue them.

This is just funny on so many levels. Clearly she is one of those freaks who really believes what she is talking about when she claims that the function of science and technology is to oppress women. She also believes that as an instructor her job is to talk at her students and not to them. She does not seem to believe that there are any standards for making a case, and if her students don't see what she takes to be obvious then they are "fascist demagogues". Clearly she is just nuts, and how she got to teach at Dartmouth is beyond me. And while I don't know that much about teaching, I know that if there is anyone whose job it is to be an adult in the class room - it's the instructor's. Priya Venkatesan has no such belief.

This is so bizarre.

Anyone heard of this John Stuart Mill fellow?

You would think if there was one publication in the world where the writers should be expected to have an inkling of what goes on in Academic life it would be in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Yet a political scientist there, a director of some center of research at Boston College displays the most complete ignorance of the point of his piece. His article laments the lack of attention that J. S. Mill gets among philosophers.

It is excusable to believe that no one reads Mill anymore. Perhaps he never took a philosophy class, or read a philosophy book. But had he done so, he would realize what a fool he is, as I would venture to say that the overwhelming number of ethics texts published struggle with Mill's ideas about utilitarianism and freedom. The overwhelming number of ethics courses and introductory philosophy courses devote some time to Mill's ideas on liberty, free speech, and utility. The majority of advanced texts and courses on Ethics devote time and space to Mill's ideas as well.

Of course the fact that ignorance is completely excusable does not justify his decision to write about it, or the Chronicle's decision to publish it. Did Alan Wolfe just not bother to ask a philosopher at Boston College if people still read Mill? There are plenty of people there who know Mill's work well.

I certainly hope that he does political science better than he does his public laments. I hear his next piece will talk about how classics don't read Homer, or perhaps how mathematicians no longer know geometry, or Protestants no longer pay attention to biblical texts. No wonder people think academics are out of touch.

In Canada

I am now in London, Ontario 3/5 of the way through a five day conference. Nice place to visit.

Review of Ladyman's Understanding Philosophy of Science

James Ladyman's Understanding Philosophy of Science is a pretty good beginning text in the philosophy of science. It is very well organized, and as straight forward as can be. There are two main sections. The first deals with the scientific method, the second deals with the question of realism.

The first section goes through the various stages in the philosophy, especially the question of induction, from the rather naive position of Francis Bacon through falsificationism and the theory of scientific revolutions.

The second section is about the question of realism, especially the problems created by underdetermination, explanation, and inference to the best explanation. There is a very good focus on van Fraassen and the nature of constructive empiricism.

This book is an excellent choice for a first introduction to the main questions in contemporary philosophy of science.

Review of Wesley Salmon's Four Decades of Scientific Explanation

Four Decades of Scientific Explanation Is an excellent overview of the history of scientific explanation as seen from the standpoint of one of its most significant contributors.

Since the late nineteenth century is is generally agreed that science provides explanations of the phenomena in the natural world. But exactly what does an explanation look like? What form does an explanation take? How do we recognize an explanation and distinguish it from pseudo-explanations and the like?

Salmon's history covers the discussion from Hempel to the state of the art in 1989 when the book was written. He covers all the major theories and all the major questions. The book is highly readable, and definitely a worthwhile investment for those who want to understand this corner of the philosophy of science.

Miami

Last weekend "D", "L", and "S" and I spent a few days in Miami. It was quite relaxing. I spent most of my time near the pool working. I think now I am suffering from nice weather withdrawal.

I am off playing soldier this weekend, and hopefully I will be able to get back to doing some serious work after that.

Purim

Wishing the world a happy Purim.

Thinkin 'bout prostitution

Today I play devil's advocate.

Elliot Spitzer has caused everyone on the planet to start thinking about prostitution. It seems too obvious that it is a victimless crime, and it boggles my mind why it is illegal at all. Clearly it is illegal because there is some taboo against it, and as enlightened as we are as a society, we have not overcome that.

One reason we consider it such a taboo is that prostitutes do something that no one likes, they show us the truth. We always punish those who show us the truth, because the truth is usually unpleasant. We like our illusions. We like believing that sex is romantic. It is something done by two people who are in love and want to give each other pleasure, and procreate and that sort of stuff.

But as anyone who has any familiarity with what we might call more "primitive" cultures knows, or as anyone who has ever paid for an engagement ring knows, or as any Marxist will insist: sex and marriage can usually be understood in much less romantic terms. Sex and marriage can be quite plausibly construed in financial terms.

Prostitution is in the unfortunate position of making it painfully obvious that sex is merely financial, or at least that sex can sometimes be construed as purely a financial matter, where sex is a service which is paid for as any other service would be. Keeping up the illusions of the romance of sex might be worth enforcing a ban on prostitution all by itself.

But although prostitution does not seem to harm or offend anyone, nor does it seem inherently immoral, there are still a few arguments that can be made for its banning.

Keep in mind that I do believe that it should be legalized. But for the sake of the argument I will put forth a few things to mull over. Consider the claim that prostitution, by being kept illegal, provides a benefit to third parties that outweigh the restriction to your rights to private sexual dealings between consenting adults.

I suppose that old-time conservatives might use this argument to argue that all sorts of deviant sex corrupt public morality, and as such provide a harm to third parties, but they are old-fashioned, and the burden rests on them to define public-morality in a non-question-begging way.

But here are the arguments:
First, because of the de facto nature of who and when we prosecute prostitution, society tends to prosecute (or in any case make a big deal out of prosecuting) only those people who would be seriously publicly embarrassed by such prosecution. That is a good thing, as it discourages people from becoming the kind of person who would seriously be embarrassed by such prosecution. For example, people who make themselves the targets or revenge by publicly embarrassing others with frivolous prosecutions. (i.e., if your hands are so dirty that you've screwed so many people, over little things, that they or their friends in turn are willing to prosecute you for sex, you really might deserve it.)

Second, it provides an enforcement mechanism for people who should not be frequenting prostitutes, not to frequent prostitutes. Married men, for example, are presumably contractually obligated (via their marriage contract) not to have sex with prostitutes. So the public prosecution of prostitution provides an enforcement mechanism for an otherwise unenforceable/unenforced breach of contract. That is, at least one type of infidelity becomes known to your spouse. A conviction of solicitation is not nearly as embarrassing if you are not married, and so the argument that it disproportionately punishes married people is quite the point. (Perhaps there is an argument that it should only be a crime for married people. Of course there is also an argument that married men need prostitutes the most, and there is thus a utilitarian argument for allowing them to violate their marriage contracts without repercussions.)

Thirdly, the ability to purchase sex cheaply (or for market value, anyway) makes it difficult for non-prostitute women who generally want to retain a monopoly on sex. That is, during a marriage, women can use the provision of sex, or more or less interesting sex as bargaining leverage in marital negotiations. Unmarried women want to reserve sex as an incentive for men to be in relationships with them.

The ability of non-prostitute majority to retain sex as leverage should outweigh the benefit to the few women who are attempting to put sex on the free-market. So the argument claims that it harms the set of female non-prostitutes.

Then again, one could argue that restaurants do the same thing, by making good food something that is commodified, and mothers and wives and girlfriends no longer have a monopoly. But there are too many disanalogies for this to be worth pursuing.

Again, I think that all the above arguments are not quite good, but I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find the problems.

Review of David Corfield's Toward a Philosophy of Real Mathematics

(Apology in advance. This may just be a hasty emotional outburst. I think I had a stronger negative reaction to the book then I should have. The author is clearly a very bright guy, and the book is better than I portray it. If you are interested in the philosophy of mathematics, read it.)

Imagine that you were Catholic, or at any rate well versed in Catholicism and Catholic teaching and practice. Now imagine you encountered a philosopher of religion. Would you have the following gripe?: Philosophers of religion don't seem to deal with what is really important to religious people. Philosophers deal with the existence of God, almost to the exclusion of lots of important philosophical problems.

So, because you don't get why the standard problems are oh-so-important you write a book. In it, you spend a chapter insisting that philosophers must look to the history of religion to understand the real problems of religion that bother its real practitioners. What problem faces practitioners? For example, you might say that looking at history, the Catholic mass started out in some language, I assume Greek (or not), and then turned to Latin, then to the vernacular, and now there is a proposal being floated to return to Latin. The history of why and how is long and complicated, and you bog chapter two down with scholarly minutiae of this history. This is a difficult and controversial question with many serious repercussions. Other religions had the same issues. Reform Judaism's split from orthodox Judaism involved the language of prayer, and Islam still is exclusively Arabic. So whatever western religion you are, chances are that the language issue is important. So why the heck do philosophers of religion act as if the only important questions are those about the nature of God, you ask repeatedly. There are serious arguments in favor of a Latin mass, you say. It is traditional, if was more fruitful in producing scholars, it forced congregants to focus on other parts of the religion, it retained an aura of mystery in the religion. . . Your book then picks on other problems that bother religious people, like food habits, concepts of purity, and the nature of fundamentalism. Each issue does contain some specks of philosophy, though few that would seriously interest most philosophers of religion. Naturally religious people like this approach, because sorting through the Ontological Argument is pretty foreign to their religion, but arguing over what language mass out to be said in is quite familiar to them. So you are hailed as a serious philosopher of religion who takes note of Real Religion, not the fake stuff studied by philosophers.

David Corfield performs a similar service for the philosophy of mathematics. He takes questions that are traditionally off the radar of philosophers of mathematics, and faults them for ignoring them. Then he elaborates on the history and nature of mathematics at great length and with serious depth, and attempts to show that there are real philosophical questions there. Are there? Yes. Am I just being conservative and scared of mathematics by thinking that those are not the important questions? I think not.

Corfield's book could be uncharitably described as warmed-over Lakatos. (I wouln't describe it as such, but I can see it.) I presume that Lakatos and his famous book Proofs and Refutations has more fans in mathematicians than in philosophers of mathematics, likely because the book is just one long mathematical problem, discussed from the perspective of the problem's history, and the history of the concepts contained in the objects of the problem. Lakatos makes some interesting philosophical points along the way: namely he tells us that our mathematical concepts change over time. But more on this in a moment.

But philosophers wonder where the important and interesting philosophy is. And that is the difference between him and traditional accounts of the philosophy of mathematics. His recent blog post about two cultures is thus odd. Besides for the fact that I do not know what philosophical problem is meant when he claims that his goal is to understand the rationality of mathematics through the history of its practice, and the fact that he caricatures traditional philosophy of mathematics by claiming that it is reducible to logicism, it misses the point. In reality it is just that there are different sets of questions that can be deemed philosophical. The ones that traditional philosophers think about are different from his, because they are not easily articulated as interesting philosophical problems, answering the traditional questions about epistemology, metaphysics, and methodology. Perhaps if they were articulated as such, they would appeal to more philosophers. As they are, they are phrased as long mathematics discussions, with some nod towards an ill defined philosophical problem.

Chapter one sets up the book and makes a case for looking at the history of mathematics as it has been practiced by real human mathematicians - with all the baggage that comes with it.

Chapter two gives us a lesson on automated theorem proves and suggests that they are so far only as good as the mathematicians that guide them, and that the real philosophical problems in mathematics ought to be what notation mathematicians need to use. You see, some notations are harder to work with and some are easier - hence the philosophical problem. Get it? Right.

Chapter three makes a philosophical problem out of thinking up conjectures. Can computers do it? Probably not so well.

Chapter four discusses the interesting problem of analogy in mathematics. Many branches in mathematics and many problems in mathematics display interesting analogies with other branches and parts of branches of mathematics. Sometimes it only gets interesting when the analogies fail to hold, sometimes a good analogy can make a whole branch of mathematics obsolete, as all of its questions get reduced to other questions.

Chapter five has an account of Bayesianism in mathematics. A Bayeseian approach as it is traditionally understood in the philosophy of science is there to try to solve the problem of induction. It does so by saying that the logic of science is not inductive in any straight forward way, but rather it is probabilistic. (This is a gross oversimplification.) This is clearly not a problem you will have in mathematics. So Corfield's Bayesianism is restricted to the nature of Bayesianism in mathematics given a subjectivist approach, that is measuring mathematicians' subjective assessments of the probabilities that a given theorem is true.

Chapter six gives a few case studies showing that theories of science often rely on their underlying theories of mathematics, or the outstanding mathematical problems, for their solutions. This is not overly newsworthy, though it is good to have a list of case studies and a nice analysis.

Chapter seven begins Corfield's discussion of Lakatos. He is generally critical, and addresses Fefferman's criticism, and also mentions Steiner's. In some sense he really does nitpick Lakatos to death. I say this as a compliment. Lakatos does make some real mistakes, and does not adequately or fairly represent the history of mathematics, even in the very restricted case he gives.

Chapter eight continues the critique of Lakatos, and this time focuses on the question of what the mathematical research program is. This looks a bit more familiar to philosophers of science. This follows the traditions of Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos, and Fayerabend in looking for the methodology behind scientific, and in this case mathematical research. Corfield claims, correctly, I think that Lakatos' view of the history of science cannot be simply carried over to the history of mathematics. The study of the methodology of mathematical research programs needs 1) some refinements, and 2) more nuance than has been given so far. This program is probably of some interest to philosophers of science and mathematics. The study started by Kuhn was very much in vogue for a bit, though philosophers of science have tended to loose interest in this in favor of the traditional problems in the philosophy of science. Kuhn and co were certainly more influential in the long run outside philosophy than they were in it.

Chapter nine is about the question of what lead to the acceptance of groupoids as an important field of study.

Chapter ten is perhaps the most disappointing. I say that because it shows the most promise and delivers the least. We are offered that tantalizing suggestion that higher-order algebra has something interesting to offer philosophers. What we are actually given is a description of roughly what higher-order algebra is, and thus suggestion that it is of a higher level of abstraction, and that some of the notation can be done in pictures. (Repeating some other philosophers who unconvincingly tried to show that pictures are philosophically interesting.) The idea of infinitesimals, sets, and modals held real promise as a field of philosophical research, and they panned out because people were able to show that there were questions that philosophers could ask and try to settle about them. I had hoped that we would at least see some real questions or suggestions about higher order category theory or algebra, but we did not. What is it about them that a philosopher might want to know about that is not there with all other branches of mathematics? That is the only thing I want to know. There is no satisfying answer given.

(As a criticism of the book, it is annoying that despite the existence of real criticism of some key ideas that he deals with, they do not appear in the book. For example, the notion of revolutions in mathematics is taken for granted, as is the legitimacy of Lakatos' idea in general. Joseph Dauben, a giant in the history of mathematics, whose essay must be well known to Corfield, famously disagreed with Crowe about the existence of revolutions in mathematics. There are also some very critical reviews of Lakatos' Proofs and Refutations in the literature that are well worth reading that Corfield ignores.)

To be honest, I do find many of the problems discussed in the book interesting, but I fail to see how many of them are philosophical. (I hope the author was not pulling one of those "let me show you a lot of math, therefore I must be right.) Many are really psychological or sociological. The problem with this is that there is a good reason why we do not see mathematics and science papers starting out "Well, first I thought X, then I realized that X was wrong, so I changed Y, and got a proof for Z. Then I had lunch and realized that I can get a proof for W if I only . . ." No one cares what got you to the theorem or the proof. Your personal history of conjectures, subjective probabilities, luncheons, conferences, and the clever insights you used to get you to the proof are not what makes up a philosophy of real mathematics. Real mathematics is what appears in mathematics journals. Everything else is part of a philosophy of real mathematicians. They are a fascinating bunch, but not necessarily a subject of philosophical reflection.

That being said, the structure of mathematical knowledge and discovery probably ought to be a part of the philosophy of mathematics. One wonders however how that could be done. Is there a logic that really describes the whole process for each case? I would doubt it, and perhaps that is what makes the problem so uninteresting - the fact that it is truly intractable.

Corfield may be doing mathematics from the inside, but he is doing philosophy from the outside. He misses the questions that are important to real philosophers. Chapter one approvingly quotes Diderot in an epigraph saying "To speak informatively about bakery you have got to have put your hands in the dough." By this token, Corfield hasn't said much about bakery, but rather he has given us a cookbook of recipes that people rarely use. Let me end with the following challenge to Corfield: Stephen Stich and Adam Morton write

Why is there so little philosophy of mathematics? . . .One explanation might be that mathematics is hard , and philosophy is hard, so the philosophy of mathematics might be doubly hard. . . . But it cannot be the whole story since very sharp and troubling points in the philosophy of mathematics can be made with elementary mathematical examples. One reason why a philosopher of mathematics needs to know some advanced mathematics is to call the bluff of others. Irrelevant by terrifyingly technical exposition is common in second rate work. . .

Corfield writes that

the prospective philosopher of mathematics quickly gathers that some arithmetic, logic, and a smattering of set theory is enough to allow her to ply her trade, and will take some convincing that investing the time in non-commutative geometry or higher-dimensional algebra is worthwhile. One of the main purposes of the book has been to argue against this.

I do not know who is right on this one. But if Corfield is, the burden of proof is still on him (or perhaps he would be magnanimous enough to show us even if it wasn't) to show that there are interesting enough philosophical problems that can only be solved if we are aware of the higher mathematics being done by groupoid theorists, and mathematicians who study higher-order algebras.
We see a few not-so-very-interesting problems, and a lot of fancy modern mathematics, but few clear convincing arguments that the two have met.

On proportionality, again

As more and more rockets come down on the Israeli town of Sderot, I was thinking about Israel’s response to the rockets a year and a half ago. I remember Israel being charged with having a disproportionate response to the shelling by Israel’s bombing in south Lebanon. I thought at the time that this was an absurd claim, and I still do. Today, Bret Stephens has a column on the proportionality calculus which essentially says that there is no proportional way for Israel to reasonably respond to the rocket attacks.

I agree. I think that there are two connected reasons why the demand for Israel's response to be "proportional" is absurd.

First, it took me about a year to realize the following irony about proportionality. Proportionality is not a value in either Jewish or Islamic notions of just war. So there is an attack by an Islamic group, a response by a Jewish group and these Christian “moral thinkers” telling the Jews that they are not adhering to Christian principles of just war in the engagement.

Does anyone else hear “cultural imperialism”?

Did I miss Augusine’s authorial hand in the Geneva Conventions?

Again, while the light of intuition might claim that some kind of proportionality ought to be a part of any theory of just war, there are more and less reasonable versions of what it can be. The ones claimed last summer were the ridiculous ones. But even so, there is no a priori version of what is to count as proportional and what is not.

Like I mentioned last summer, it is clear that sending a nuclear weapon to solve a minor trade dispute is disproportional. But on the other hand, Israel, for all its shelling, did not achieve the status quo ante, which is the goal of proportionality, to do just enough to rectify the situation. Israel did not get its soldiers back. Assuming that there is a chance that they can somehow accomplish this with enough military action, they have not yet even put up a “proportional” fight. Israel still has way more fighting to go till they hit “proportional”. So there is no clear line that makes it easy to understand what it would be to be proportional.

It seems like legalistic religions like Judaism and Islam don’t have to deal with these line-drawing problems. They have rules telling them how and when they fight. Christianity, which is more (for the lack of a better word) theologico-philosophical, and less legal, has to first answer these questions about what proportionality is before it can come to an understanding of who is in the right on the in bello issues. (And anyone who knows what the phrase “conceptual analysis” means knows that there is no way to figure out what “proportional” is.)

This kind of thinking then just encourages Christian thinkers to work their way backward - first decide who you don’t like. Then draw your line so that the side you are initially prejudiced against looses.

Which takes me to the second reason. What we really see from this is that despite the intuition that we need some sort of proportional response, proportionality is most likely incoherent. There are just too many real cases where a country has no feasible response if it is to act proportionally. Obviously you can't tell a country that it just has to let its citizens get shelled and killed because the country has no options that meet your moral standards.

It also seems obvious that asking some "Christian" European country (or collection thereof) to go in and solve this problem in some way that they deem proportional will not work. After all, it was their colonialist meddling incursions in the Middle East that started these problems in the first place.

So I take it that from a moral perspective, the problem is unsolvable given the Just War paradigm that thinkers who operate in a Christian tradition use. That means that their condemnatory rhetoric is merely that - rhetoric. Rhetoric that agitates against one side for not solving an intractable problem merely reflects a prejudice against that side. Moreover, I see this as an argument for political realism in this case.

Eclipse

I hope you all caught the lunar eclipse last night. It was awesome!

Review of Moshe Koppel's Meta-Halakhah

(Note: Normally after reading a book, I would just type out something as an afterthought and post it here. This time is no different, but this time it comes with an apology to the author. This book deserves more than some afterthoughts, I am just not in a position now to write any up right now.)

I think Jewish philosophy took some wrong turns over the years. Let me explain. A significant portion of Jewish philosophy has always been, parasitic, if you will, off all other philosophy. This is not a bad thing. To the contrary. Jewish philosophy, in its good days, took the latest tools from the mainstream philosophers, and applied them to problems of Jewish concern - sometimes integrating them with Jewish thought, or criticizing them from the perspective of Jewish thought, or criticizing Jewish thought thought from the perspective of the most modern pieces of secular philosophy. Some of the most prominent Jewish philosophers did that, and it is mainly because of their ability to do that so well, that we now see them as part of mainstream thinking. When we think of Philo, Maimonides, Gersonides, Mendelssohn, Albo, Krochmal, and many others, this should be readily apparent.

Modern Anglo philosophy broke with European philosophy with the works of Frege and Russell. As the story goes, Russell broke off with Hegelian idealism, and two streams of thought started - one caught on in English-speaking countries, and the other on the
continent. That is not to say that there is not a lot of overlap in the questions they ask, the methodology they employ, or the answers they give. But there are considerable differences between them, and for better or worse, philosophers in the "continental tradition" and philosophers in the Anglo "analytic tradition" do not read each other's works much. The Anglo philosophers tend to see their philosophy through the light of formal logic, whereas the philosophers on the continent tend to see their philosophy through the light of sociology. These are different takes on philosophy.

More modern European Jewish philosophers like Franz Rosenzweig wrote within the tradition of Hegel and the Europeans. The tradition continues with Levinas doing Jewish-like philosophy within a very Franco-European tradition. (Sometimes manifested in works of people like Marc-Alain Ouaknin.)

All of this is not about being territorial. Rather it still about the "wrong turns" I mentioned. J. B. Soloveitchik, perhaps the most important Jewish philosopher in the English-speaking world alive in my lifetime, also took inspiration from much of the
European existentialism in which he was educated. Naturally, an industry grew up studying Soloveitchik. What has failed to happen in Jewish thought was any attempt at analytic Jewish philosophy - that is Jewish philosophy that has emerged using the tools of modern 20th and 21st century Anglo thought. (There are some works that might be classified as exceptions.)

I think that for all I don't like about it, Moshe Koppel's Meta-halakhah might have been the first book that competently employs the tools of modern logic and analysis to Jewish thought. Koppel tackles some of the hardest and trickiest problems that Halakhah (Jewish Law) faces. These are not questions about any particular law, or legal problem, but rather he asks the questions about the foundational issues about the law. Jewish law is notoriously complicated. There are disputes, reconciliations, open questions, and principles of derivation. Some of the toughest moments come when we ask questions like: can all of Jewish Law be derived mechanically from the original Law (at Sinai)? What is the nature of an "interpretation" of Jewish law? How could Moses not have understood the laws being taught in his name by Rabbi Akiba? What does it mean for the Torah to be a "living" document and also be divine? If God has the law up in Heaven that is perfect, why do we consider it a foundations of Jewish Law that the Torah is "not in Heaven"? Why was it so bad to write down the law? Isn't it better, if the law is perfect, to have it down so it does not get changed?

Koppel deals with all these questions, and more using the notions of computability, model, derivability, verifyability, provability, etc. He gives a spirited defense of an understanding of Jewish law that has a two-fold nature. That is there is a level of Jewish law that is intuitive, and a level on which it is logical. He claims that prophets only have intuitions about what the law is, and interpreters of the law are only able to put them in to formal models. Each has its advantages, but both are necessary for the complete functioning and understanding of Jewish Law.

Like I said, because of this book's uniqueness in treating issues of Jewish Law in a sophisticated way it deserves more careful consideration than I am giving it here. I will just say that while I think Koppel's treatment must be on the right track, I am not convinced that it is right. He claims outright that he did not write a scholarly book, and that is correct. He should have. There is some literature that would be useful, and the topic deserves a more extensive treatment. Nonetheless this is a valuable contribution, and the lack of critical reception over the past 10 years since the book came out speaks more of the sorry state of contemporary Orthodox Jewish thought than it does of the book itself.

It should be read by all who want to start understanding the hard questions about Jewish Law.

(PS I'm not sure what the deal with the approbation is. I didn't really understand it. It looked weird.)

Review of A Debate on Jewish Emancipation and Christian Theology in Old Berlin

I have been reading a lot more lately than I have been writing about, but I wanted to throw in a note about the collection By Richard Crouter and Julie Klassen that I just read.

As soon as Jews had some freedom in Germany during the Enlightenment, they started producing an abundance of scholars and men of letters. Each one staked out his own position on Jews and their relationship to the state. From Mendelssohn and on, they advocated for Jewish emancipation from the prejudicial and anti-Semitic laws of the German state. Mendelssohn argued (on philosophical grounds) for simple equality, and a sort of separation of Church and state. David Friedlander, after a long and what must have seemed like fruitless quest to try to improve the Jews and their situation in Germany, argued for mass fake conversion to Christianity.

What do I mean by "fake"? Well, he thought that Jews really didn't need the ceremonial laws, and he thought that no one would know if Jews didn't believe in Jesus when they converted to Christianity, so he asked the State, in an Open Letter, to accept the mass conversion of Jews who agree to stop outwardly practicing Judaism, and get baptized Protestant without actually believing in Jesus.

If you ask me, that misses the point from the perspective of both religions. And the important protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Abraham Teller both agreed. Both wrote responses to Friedlander's letter. Naturally they agreed that keeping the Jewish rituals was unnecessary, but they thought that a fake conversion was no conversion at all, and moreover has the potential to harm Christianity. Of course, in accordance with Enlightenment values, neither thought that being Jewish should be a bar to getting rights though.

For Jews, especially those of Mendelssohn's ilk, keeping the mitzvot is Judaism (though they definitely argued in favor of the existence of God). For Christians Belief in the divinity of Christ is Christianity.

Crouter and Klassen collect their three documents as well as anonymous satirical polemic asking for rights for Jews. The translation reads well, and it is a valuable set of documents for those interested in this period.

I wish they would have included more of the responses to Friedlander. There were many written in pamphlets and in the popular press. I would love to have seen some of them. Also, I should mention that there is an essay at the end that feels totally out of place. It is mostly a discussion about the situation of the Turks and their problems with emancipation in contemporary Germany. While it is interesting, it just really doesn't belong here. I am not sure who at Hackett publishers agreed to it. It's point is unclear and except in the sense that Turks and Jews are both not considered German and they both have had problems there, I am pretty sure the essay is unrelated to the others.

(Also, there is one minor error, which I am not sure whether I ought to attribute to Teller or to the translators, but on p 135 they use the term "yom Ha'aretz", which literally means "earth day". The word they meant to use was "am ha'aretz" - literally: people of the earth.)