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Abstract

We are a discussion network funded in our founding year as a Collaborative Project of the American Academy of Religion. “The Postmodern Jewish Philosophy Bitnetwork” represents the first stage of a BITNET journal of Postmodern Judaism, philosophically considered: referring both to the plurality of contemporary Jewish religious expressions, philosophically considered and to the plurality of postmodern methods of Jewish philosophy and philosophical theology. In the history of Judaism, the two principle paradigms of philosophic inquiry have been the Jewish Aristotelianism and neo-Platonism of the Arabic speaking Jewish philosophers of medieval Spain, and the Jewish Kantianism of the largely German speaking Jewish philosophers of 19th-20th century Europe. For now, we are using the term “postmodern” very loosely to refer to what may be a third paradigm of Jewish philosophic inquiry, emerging from out of Kantian and Aristotelian roots. As we use it, the term may refer to any of a variety of hermeneutical, semiotic, process, feminist and deconstructive inquiries, all of which are adapted to and influenced by emergent forms of Scriptural and Talmudic text interpretation and all of which generate corresponding varieties of philosophical theology.

In its first year, the goal of the Network is to identify the variety of “postmodern” Jewish inquiries as currently practiced and to elicit generalizations about what these inquiries may share: in other words, to begin to clarify what we mean by “postmodern.” We may, in fact, discover that we mean too many things by it and that we need either to delimit our conversation further or at least to rename it. Our plan is to disseminate to our limited membership a Network issue every three months (or whenever else we want to!). For the first two or three issues, we will collect brief descriptions of articles and books already written by our members and pertinent to the work of postmodern Jewish philosophy and philosophical theology. By the second issue, we will disseminate, as well, our members’ initial thoughts about the approaches that seem to inform these descriptions: what the various subgroups of approaches may be and what they share and don’t share. By the fourth issue, we hope to reach initial conclusions about how to define our Network so that, in the second year, we might expand our membership and invite papers that belong to a single conversation, however broadly or inclusively characterized. We plan to use the annual meetings of both the AAR and the Academy of Jewish Philosophy as occasions to gather ourselves for face-to-face discussion.

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