Religion and Ideas

Theory of Knowledge
The purpose of this study group is to advance Israeli research in epistemology, help widen publication of articles in leading philosophical journals by providing suggestions and criticisms, help prepare members of the group for conference presentations, as well as strengthen cooperation with epistemological research abroad. Members of the group are leading epistemologists in Israel and the group is expected to invite leading epistemologists from other countries for workshops on topics that are in the focus of the group's research.
Academic Director: Dr. Levi Spectre
Academic Advisor: Prof. Avishai Margalit 
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Fictions of God and Time in a Posthuman Age
The term "posthumanism" names a cultural and philosophical framework that emerged in the wake of modern disruptions of humanism. It signals a crisis in the philosophical conception of "human being" – a crisis which may be traced as far back as Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud, and which takes full shape in contemporary thought about technology and virtuality. The group discusses texts of a fictional and philosophical nature that thematize this crisis. It attends to such staple posthumanist issues as the interaction between human consciousness and the digital environment, the intersection of phenomenology and cybernetics, or the impact of modern technology on the distinction between self and world. However, the group's focus is on two topics traditionally regarded as the purview of a distinctively human experience: the relation with divinity and the experience of time.
Academic Director: Dr. Ruben Borg
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Mystical and Philosophical Knowledge in Al-Andalus: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in the Middle Ages
Andalus in the Middle Ages saw a period of unparalleled fruitfulness in the areas of philosophy and mysticism in Muslim, Jewish, and Christian circles. One of the most central themes common to all three religions and to mysticism and philosophy alike is the question as to the attainment of true knowledge. It is sometimes thought that mystics and philosophers differ on the grounds that knowledge obtained by intellectual means cannot be equivalent to that obtained through mystical experience. Nevertheless, both philosophers and mystics in the Middle Ages accepted the authority of Holy Scriptures – be they the Hebrew Bible, the Quran, or the Gospels – and as such accepted a kind of knowledge through revelation that often appeared to be beyond the grasp of the human intellect. We will examine medieval approaches to knowledge in light of the many shared encounters between mysticism and philosophy, exploring the possibility that there may have existed a unique and widely influential "mystical philosophy" that combined neo-Platonic and Aristotelian elements to form an experiential account of intellectually obtained knowledge.
Academic director: Dr. Yehuda Halper

Philosophy and Science of Judaism – Beyond the Ideal of Science
This reading and research group aims to closely examine the relation between tradition and science, in order to understand the crisis of the Humanities in general and of Jewish Studies in particular. The question of the relation between science and life, which is a classical philosophical question, and whose roots are to be found in ancient philosophy, will provide us with a large framework, in which we will try to understand this crisis as it appears in the history of the "Science of Judaism".
Director: Dr. Eli Schonfeld

Subjectivity in Christian Theology and Philosophy
The goal of this research group is to reconstruct the specific Christian identity in its different confessional articulations (Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox). This reconstruction will be developed in two major steps. First, for the age of modernity, that is, the context of secular culture: political theology and its "antireligious effect." Then, for the age of the Church Fathers: medieval theology, mysticism, and the two great splits between the Catholic and the Orthodox churches and between Catholicism and the Protestant churches (Luther, Calvin). The analysis focuses on the structure of Christian subjectivity in its relation to self and other, world and society, church and state.
Conferences and public lectures:
Paul – the Apostle of Exception – in Theology, Philosophy and Contemporary Judaism, 5-6 May 2009
The "Resurrection" of the Subject: Subjectivity and Post-Subjectivity in the Age of the Post-Secular, 22-23 December 2009
Prof. William Desmond, "Love and the Passion of Being: Subjectivity in the Light of Solidarity”, 15 April 2010
Academic Directors: Prof. Christoph Schmidt, Dr. Merav Mack