Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies

The Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies is a DFG-Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe directed by Prof Dr Giuseppe Veltri. It opened in October 2015 and will run for eight years. The central aim of the Maimonides Centre is to explore and research scepticism in Judaism in its dual manifestation as a purely philosophical tradition and as a more general expression of sceptical strategies, concepts, and attitudes in the cultural field.

MCAS offers a senior and junior fellowship programme that allows internationally established scholars, as well as aspiring early career researchers, to participate for short or extended periods of time. It will host four senior fellows and four junior fellows (postdoctoral candidates) during the winter term (1 October 2022 to 31 March 2023).

Senior Fellows

Thomas Krödel, Hanna Liss, Ran Segev, Roberto Vinco.

Junior Fellows

Kirill Chepurin, Níels Páll Eggerz, Frank Kurzmann, Chiara Rover.

Limits of Faith and Scepticism in Zhang Zai (1020–1078)
Michael Friedrich (Universität Hamburg)

In recognition of Giuseppe Veltri’s 25 years of service as a university professor.

Date
Tuesday, 25 October 2022, MCAS

• 18:00 Lecture
• 19:00 Reception 

Abstract
When used as a practical means of achieving tranquillity or as a tool to defeat an opponent in debate, scepticism is never an end in itself, but rather serves various purposes, which have been thoroughly discussed by historians of philosophy and intellectual history. It is perhaps not by accident that not all periods have witnessed strong currents of scepticism and that “Pyrrhonism” only emerged after the establishment of the Macedonian empire. While taking the philosophical relevance of questioning the possibility of absolute scepticism into consideration, this talk will mainly focus on Zhang Zai (1020–1078), a so-called Neo-Confucian, and his intellectual career, offering a close examination and contextualisation of one of his dicta emphasising the importance of doubt on one’s path to real knowledge. The results will be juxtaposed with the career of a contemporary Western scholar, allowing surprising shortcuts between times and places and some insights that are hopefully relevant to the enquiry undertaken at MCAS.

Michael Friedrich is a professor emeritus of Sinology at Universität Hamburg.

Maimonides Lectures on Scepticism are scheduled up to four times times a semester. Eminent scholars focusing on various aspects of scepticism are invited to present and discuss their research in an evening lecture.

• Tuesday, 1 November 2022, at 18:00, MCAS
  James Conant (The University of Chicago)
  
  
• Tuesday, 31 January 2023, at 18:00, MCAS
  Dimitrios Vasilakis (University of Ioannina)
  
  
• Tuesday, 14 February 2023, at 18:00, MCAS
  Zalman Rothschild (Stanford Law School)
  
  
• tba, MCAS
  Marcin Wodziński (Uniwersytet Wrocławski)

Further information will follow soon.

Date
2–3 November 2022

Convenors
Mahdi Ranaee (Universität Siegen) and Stephan Schmid (Universität Hamburg)

Abstract
In his “A Resolute Reading of Descartes” (2020), James Conant offers an original and thought-provoking new reading of Descartes’s challenging and controversial Creation Doctrine, along the lines of his “Resolute Reading of Wittgenstein.” While authors usually understand Descartes to be claiming in this doctrine that God could create the eternal truths – e.g., the laws of logic – in a totally different and (to us) unintelligible way, Conant argues that it should be read as only making a negative claim regarding our own abilities, not a positive one regarding God’s abilities. Accordingly, this doctrine should not be read as telling us anything about God’s ability. Conant also uses this reading to constitute the basis of Descartes’s evil demon scepticism, which makes it an instance of what he calls Kantian scepticism—as opposed to the dream scepticism, which is an instance of Cartesian scepticism (cf. Conant, 2012). In this seminar, we propose to have both established and early career scholars engage with Conant’s resolute reading of Descartes and its historiographical implications and to have Conant himself respond to the critics. The results of this workshop are intended to be published as either a special issue or a brief volume.

Dr Dr Doru Doroftei has left the Institute for Jewish Philosophy and Religion (research associate 2020–2022) in order to start a research associate position in the Bavarian Research Center for Interreligious Discourses (BaFID) at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in October 2022. Congratulations, Doru! We wish you a great start in Erlangen.

Professor Racheli Haliva has been appointed as an associate professor of Jewish studies at the Center for Judaic and Inter-Religious Studies at Shandong University in Jinan, China. Congratulations, Racheli! We wish you a great start in Jinan.

PD Dr Patrick Benjamin Koch, the principal investigator of the “Jewish Moralistic Writings of the Early Modern Period” Emmy Noether Research Group, received his habilitation from the Faculty of Humanities at Universität Hamburg with a monographic study on the topic “Tasting the Taste of Death: Simulations of Capital Punishment in Early Modern Jewish Literature.” He was awarded the venia legendi in the field of Jewish studies. Congratulations, Patrick!

HEPMASITE (“Hebrew Philosophical Manuscripts as Sites of Engagement”) is a five-year research project headed by Yoav Meyrav. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 101041376).

HEPMASITE will tackle the corpus of medieval Hebrew philosophical manuscripts in order to unravel the hidden history of Jewish philosophy enveloped within them. It aims to reconceptualise the understanding of Jewish philosophy as it took place in the real world and as it was studied by actual people.