RT Article
T1 Pragmatism and Theology: Between Hasdai Crescas and Charles Peirce
JF Modern theology
VO 39
IS 2
SP 232
OP 254
A1 Ochs, Peter 1950-
LA English
PB Wiley-Blackwell
YR 2023
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1839633182
AB The noted Jewish scholar Harry Wolfson (d. 1929) claimed in youthful writings that the fifteenth-century rabbinic thinker and physicist, Hasdai Crescas, was a pragmatist. This essay introduces evidence that there are, indeed, significant analogies between elements of Hasdai Crescas’s critique of Aristotle and elements of Charles Peirce’s pragmatism. The essay concludes that Crescas’s primary work, Light of the Lord (Or Hashem), displays a unique analogue to classical American pragmatism, which analogue I label “rabbinic pragmatism” and classify as a subtype of “Jewish pragmatism.” The essay’s central hypothesis is that Crescas’s scientific reasoning is correlative to his Torah-based reasoning. A second hypothesis is that the enabling conditions of this correlativity are the inquirer’s relation to God as author of Creation and of the Commandments (mitzvah). I argue that Crescas’s non-finite mathematics (a potential source for Galileo) is correlative to his account of the non-finite meanings of each Commandment so that each command displays fresh meanings in each new context of life.
DO 10.1111/moth.12810