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 nine 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.

The Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies (MCAS) would like to invite researchers to apply for its junior fellowship programme (doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships) for the academic year 1 October 2023 to 30 September 2024.

Application deadline: 31 January 2023

Dionysius the Areopagite between Faith and Scepticism: His Reception in the Twentieth Century
Dimitrios A. Vasilakis (Universität Erfurt/University of Ioannina)

Date
Tuesday 31 January 2023, 18:00

Abstract
The author of the Areopagitic Corpus (ca. sixth century AD) engaged with pagan Neoplatonism and the Christian tradition (which also drew on Hebrew heritage, according to Golitzin). He is famous for systematising the dual path leading to God: kataphatic (positive) and apophatic (negative) theology. Faith (pistis), a Platonic term used by Proclus (fifth century) to describe how we can come into contact with divinity, relates to the apophatic mode: because God transcends us, we may have only pistis for Him, who stricto sensu is unknown. Thus, we find scepticism at the top of the system. Gregory Palamas (fourteenth century) developed the Dionysian dialectic of kataphasis-apophasis, employing the distinction between essence and energies. He played a pivotal role in Dionysian hermeneutics, becoming a hallmark of twentieth-century Russian/Greek intellectuals who attempted to release the Eastern Christian tradition from its “Babylonian captivity,” as Florovsky would say. However, Dionysius’s reception was mixed: some thinkers trusted that he was representing genuine orthodoxy (e.g., Lossky and Yannaras), while others were sceptical (Meyendorff, Schmemann, St Sophrony Sakharov) or neutral (Florovsky and Zizioulas). In his talk, Dimitrios Vasilakis will sketch out this framework, expanding on examples of Dionysius’s reception, on the basis of the kataphasis-apophasis pair.

Dimitrios A. Vasilakis is a research associate in the “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s Reception among Key Thinkers of the 20th Century Orthodox World (Vl. Lossky, Fr. Sophrony, Chr. Yannaras, J. Zizioulas)” DFG project at Universität Erfurt. He has recently been elected and is under appointment as an assistant professor of philosophy of late antiquity and the Middle Ages at the University of Ioannina, Greece.

ed. Cedric Cohen-Skalli and Libera Pisano
Skepsis and Antipolitics: The Alternative of Gustav Landauer
Boston, Leiden: Brill, 2022.

Gustav Landauer was an unconventional anarchist who aspired to a return to a communal life. His antipolitical rejection of authoritarian assumptions is based on a radical linguistic scepticism that could be considered the theoretical premise of his anarchism. The present volume aims to add to the existing scholarship on Landauer by shedding new light on his work, focussing on the two interrelated notions of skepsis and antipolitics. In a time marked by a deep doubt concerning modern politics, Landauer’s alternative can help us to more seriously address the struggle for a different articulation of our communitarian and ecological needs.

The Maimonides Library for Philosophy and Religion (MLPR) book series aims to present a wide spectrum of studies and texts that cover philosophy and religion in a Jewish context, broadly construed. The series seeks to explore connections, tensions, and dialectics between philosophy and religion in the Jewish tradition through monographs, collected volumes, scholarly translations, and critical editions of key texts. Special emphasis will be given to unearthing sceptical elements within Jewish thought and in relation to other traditions, as well as to its interactions with the scientific and intellectual climate in which it is situated.

Welcome to Dr Lucas Oro Hershtein, who joined the “HEPMASITE” ERC project as a postdoctoral researcher in November 2022. Before coming to Hamburg, he was a research associate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of York on the “Comparative Jewish, Christian and Islamic Analytic Theology” project (John Templeton Foundation Preparatory Grant, 2021–2022) and a postdoctoral fellow at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET, 2019–2021). He wrote his dissertation on the theologico-political reading of Plotinian metaphysics by Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sijistānī (Buenos Aires, March 2019).

For almost fifteen years, the Jewish Salon in Hamburg has been organising and hosting events about Jewish culture in past and present. It is a respected and well-known institution dedicated to encounter and exchange and the diversity of Jewish life. This year, the continuous commitment and voluntary work of its members was acknowledged by the German federal government, as it was awarded the first Ehrenamtspreis für jüdisches Leben in Deutschland [Volunteer Award for Jewish Life in Germany] by Dr Felix Klein, the Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism. In the historical setting of the Max-Lieberman-Haus in Berlin, members of the salon (among them its vice chair, Dr Sebastian Schirrmeister, a research associate on the “Wandering Artefacts: The Materialistic History of German-Jewish Archives” project at Universität Hamburg) received the award from the hands of Dr Klein and the Federal Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser. The award for initiatives undertaken by people under the age of twenty-seven was awarded to the “Jüdisches Halle – gestern und heute” project.

Miruna Belea has obtained a research fellowship as part of the EU-funded “Early Jewish and Christian Magical Traditions” research project at the Università Ca’Foscari Venezia. From December 2022, she will be working with a team of international scholars on proper and improper rituals in Jewish and Christian magical traditions. She remains a doctoral candidate at Universität Hamburg.

The “PESHAT in Context Context—Premodern Philosophic and Scientific Hebrew Terminology in Context. An Online Thesaurus” project investigates, documents, and contextualises philosophical and scientific Hebrew terminology of the pre-modern era, systematically scrutinising central works of medieval Jewish philosophy from the ninth to sixteenth centuries and documenting the relevant terminology in a database. This documentation also includes equivalent terms in other ancient languages (namely Greek, Latin, and Classical Arabic), as well as in modern languages (including English and German). Researchers in the project also document quotations in Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, and Greek that demonstrate the concrete employment of the terms in Hebrew works and in other related sources. The complex documentation process, as well as collaborations with partner projects, enables users of the database to comprehensively reconstruct the dynamics of cultural exchange and the historical development of Hebrew scientific discourse over the centuries.

This project is funded by the German Research Foundation and will run for twelve years. Its principal investigator is Giuseppe Veltri from the Institute for Jewish Philosophy and Religion at Universität Hamburg, in collaboration with Reimund Leicht (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Resianne Fontaine (Universiteit van Amsterdam). Its technical maintenance and development is carried out in collaboration with HITeC, Hamburg.

Fourth Funding Period

The project team has successfully applied for a fourth and final funding phase (2023–2025). During this phase, the project will host an international conference in Hamburg (2024) and will produce a series of publications in the Officina Philosophica Hebraica series published by Brill. All publications will be dedicated to the study of pre-modern Hebrew philosophical and scientific terminology. The total funding for the current phase is 946,100 EUR.