Johannes Climacus, thirty years old, born and bred in Copenhagen, aspires to eternal happiness. Becoming a Christian, he says, is a prerequisite for this happiness. Climacus is a pseudonym for Søren Kierkegaard, the renowned nineteenth century Danish philosopher considered to be the father of existential philosophy. In two books: Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments , Kierkegaard portrays Climacus's religious development in his search for his own way to faith, as if he were climbing a psychological/epistemological ladder to reach the climax of spiritual existence. This spiritual development culminates in the believer's dialogue with the absolute-God. In Human Dialogue with the Absolute , the author describes Climacus's philosophical journey to absolute faith. She focuses on the religious stage of Kierkegaard's philosophy, in particular the climax of religious existence, in which the believer attains 'an absolute relation to the absolute'. The believer aspires to remove his doubts and establish a serious, absolute approach within his existence, toward the absolute-God. The philosophical and existential questions that constitute the central theme of this book are how a believer can acknowledge his progress; and how will he know that he has conquered spiritual climax, attained absolute faith. These questions are meaningful even today to the spiritual person.

On the morning of June 7th 415 BC the people of Athens woke to find that the statues of the Idol Hermes, which stood in front of private houses and temples where vandalised. Every citizen could see his divine guardian standing at his doorstep damaged and desecrated, and gradually they found that they not alone, the whole city have lost its divine guardian. Trepidation was great. The Athenians wanted to discover the identity of the vandalisers and announced that they will give rewards and immunity to the informers who would provide some information about the blasphemy. The information received included more than information about the damaging of statues, it included information about desecration of Oration ceremonies held in private houses. The scandal was immense, the biggest one in Athenian history. Arrests were made, prosecutions, executions and flights to exile. Andocides, who was one of the accused, lists, in the defence speech he gave, the speech about the Orations, the chain of events and tries, of-course, to prove his innocence. The speech gives important information on the scandal and is an key source for learning about state events at the end of the 5th century BC.

Two distinct theories, each developed by an important theoretician in the field of psychoanalysis, constitute the theoretical starting point of this book. Donald Winnicott described the dialectic between two modalities of experience, the subjective and the objective, as creating a potential space. Wilfred Bion, from a totally different standpoint, considered the possible effects of destructive relations between an emergent aspect and a continuous aspect of human very being, believing that the interaction between them was central to the existence of a healthy and dynamic self. Bion thus assumed not only the simultaneous existence of two forms of perception, but also the existence of dynamic relationships between them. The aim of this book is to go one stage beyond these theories, and to describe the specific significance of different types of interaction between the two aspects of the self, as defined by Bion, by examining the influence of the integration between them on Winnicott’s potential space. For this purpose I expand Bion’s definition of these two elements: The term ‘emergent self’ embraces that aspect of the self which experiences the world of objects as constantly changing, discontinuous, impossible to grasp and explain, and not cumulative in terms of past and future or cause and effect. As against this, the term ‘continuous self’ embraces that aspect of the self which is responsible for the experience of continuity, for the ability to make deductions, and for the ability to remember and thereby to accumulate objects in terms of the laws of common reality: causality, time and space. In this context I show that every mental event, whether it is located in consciousness or in the unconscious, in a dream or in memory, contains these two modalities. Every mental event has an emergent aspect – which marks it as a unique, private event, inexplicable and unforeseeable – as well as a continuous aspect that simultaneously locates that same event as part of a sequence of causality and memory. The nature of the interaction between the emergent and the continuous aspects determines the possible degree of integration between them, which creates what I designate as the ‘lyrical dimension of potential space’: the dimension which transforms human mind from a flat expanse to a three-dimensional space. The manner in which the lyrical dimension of mental space makes it possible to extract the a priori potential from within the boundaries of actual existence is described as explaining the human capacity to mourn, to know and to love. The book analyzes several major literary works, such as T.S Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphe”, as well as Israeli writers (H.N. Bialik, Amos Oz, A.B. Yohoshua), that either describe or else enact different variations on the theme of the lyrical dimension.

What is fair? How do rights join hands with generosity? How can punishment be justified? Is there recompense for human suffering? What sense can we make of immortality, or of the idea of a messianic age? In On Justice , Lenn Goodman offers the first general theory of justice for more than a century to tap the riches of the Jewish tradition-biblical, rabbinic, and philosophical-and bring its texts into dialogue with the classic works of Western ethics and political philosophy. Against the backdrop of a conversation, he opens up with Saadiah, Halevi, Maimonides, and Spinoza, with Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Rawls-Goodman, developing a fresh, ontological approach to the core issues of ethics, politics, and the human condition. The original ideas of On Justice will engage both Jewish and non-Jewish philosophers and students of society and ethics.

The book Idea and Method, Thirty-three studies in Plato , is an anthology of essays translated to Hebrew, and published by Prof. Samuel Scolnicov, over the past thirty five years. These essays portray a large range of the Platonic subjects relating to some of the following: The Platonic Logos, and the function of Irony in the Platonic Dialogues; The Hypothetical Method, Epistemological and Metaphysical questions, The Concept of Love in the Platonic theory; Plato's Later Theory, his theory of Nature, his theory of Language, Plato's concept of Education, his Political Theory, and his view of Tragedy.

The book breaks with Nietzsche's previous essay style (as in The Birth of Tragedy). It is a collection of aphorisms, largely concerned with human psychology. He criticizes social Darwinism in it: Wherever progress is to ensue, deviating natures are of greatest importance. Every progress of the whole must be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures retain the type, the weaker ones help to advance it. Something similar also happens in the individual. There is rarely a degeneration, a truncation, or even a vice or any physical or moral loss without an advantage somewhere else. In a warlike and restless clan, for example, the sicklier man may have occasion to be alone, and may therefore become quieter and wiser; the one-eyed man will have one eye the stronger; the blind man will see deeper inwardly, and certainly hear better. To this extent, the famous theory of the survival of the fittest does not seem to me to be the only viewpoint from which to explain the progress of strengthening of a man or of a race.§224 Nietzsche also distinguishes in this work the obscurantism of the metaphysicians and theologians from the more subtle obscurantism of Kant's critical philosophy and modern philosophical skepticism, claiming that obscurantism is that which obscures existence rather than obscures ideas alone: "The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it wants to darken individual understanding but that it wants to blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence" (Vol. II, Part 1, 27).

"Criticism of Modern Secular Culture" discusses the ethical, social, national-political humanistic and religious foundations of modern and post-modern secular culture, especially amongst the Jewish People and in the State of Israel. The topics discussed are from a philosophical-historical perspective that relates directly to the present. The book defines the basic values of Western Humanism from a Jewish point of view, and analyses the problems of their implementation. It evaluates the achievements and the tragic failures of secular modernism which became factually anti-humanistic.

This book offers an account of a key event in Jewish intellectual history that is also an important chapter in the history of Western philosophy: the dissemination of Maimonides’ chief philosophical work, the Guide of the Perplexed, through Samuel ibn Tibbon at the beginning of the 13th century in Southern France. Whereas Maimonides interpreted Judaism as a philosophical religion, Ibn Tibbon turned this interpretation into the foundation of Jewish philosophy up to Spinoza, making it into a systematic justification for studying Greco-Arabic philosophy and science in a religious setting. If Maimonides’ work was the gate through which philosophy became an important component of Jewish culture, Ibn Tibbon built the hinge without which this gate would have remained shut. The book examines Ibn Tibbon’s relationship to Maimonides in all its facets: how he translated Maimonides’ work from Arabic into Hebrew, explained its technical terminology, and interpreted and taught its doctrines. Due attention is also paid to Ibn Tibbon’s comprehensive criticism of Maimonides. The book includes the edition of what may be called the first commentary on the Guide: about 100 glosses attributed to Ibn Tibbon that were discovered through examining 145 manuscripts of Ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew translation. The glosses illustrate the different aspects of Ibn Tibbon’s relationship to Maimonides and the complex transition of Maimonides’ work from one cultural context to another.