Judaism: Dialogue with Philosophy

What Judaism: Dialogue with Philosophy covers

Judaism in dialogue with philosophy of religion: Maimonides and Halevi on proving God, negative theology, the soul and the world to come, Buber and Sinai on religious experience, miracles from the Mishnah to Spinoza, and responses to the Holocaust. Part of Component 2, sat only by students who take Judaism as their chosen religion.

The 2 subtopics

Each one has its own page.

• Judaism and Philosophy: The DialogueMaimonides' proofs and negative theology, Halevi's Kuzari, Mendelssohn on the soul and on revealed law, Buber, Spinoza on miracles and scripture, and Rubenstein, Berkovits and Fackenheim after the Holocaust.Open →
• Evaluating the Reasonableness of Jewish BeliefThe criteria of reasonableness, meaning and coherence, faith as belief in and belief that, and how each applies to Jewish belief in God, the Shema and the Holocaust.Open →

What you need to know

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Questions from this topic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   How did Maimonides use philosophy to argue for the existence of God?

   Model answer

   In the Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), drawing on Aristotle, he argued from motion to an unmoved first mover and from contingent things to a necessary being, so that the God of the Torah could be defended by reason.

2. 2

   How did Judah Halevi challenge philosophical proofs of God in the Kuzari?

   Model answer

   In the Kuzari (c. 1140) the Khazar king is convinced not by the philosopher but by the rabbi's appeal to the revelation at Sinai, witnessed by the whole people, so Halevi grounds faith in shared historical experience rather than abstract proof.

3. 3

   How has Maimonides' negative theology influenced the philosophy of religious language?

   Model answer

   He held that God is utterly one and beyond comparison, so positive attributes would wrongly divide God and we can say only what God is not. Aquinas engaged with 'Rabbi Moses' on this when he developed his doctrine of analogy.

4. 4

   How has philosophy shaped Jewish beliefs about the self, death and the afterlife?

   Model answer

   The Hebrew Bible speaks of Sheol and a unified person, but contact with Greek thought brought the idea of an immortal soul. Maimonides described the world to come as the spiritual life of the intellect while still affirming bodily resurrection, and Moses Mendelssohn's Phaedon (1767) defended the soul's immortality on Platonic lines.

5. 5

   How has Judaism influenced philosophical discussion of religious experience?

   Model answer

   Martin Buber's I and Thou (1923) described meeting God as a relationship rather than observing an object, which shaped existentialist and Christian thought, and the revelation at Sinai is presented as a public experience of a whole nation rather than a private one.

6. 6

   How might a Jewish thinker answer the objection that religious experiences are private and cannot be checked?

   Model answer

   By pointing to Sinai, which tradition presents as witnessed by the entire people and handed down unbroken; critics reply that what survives is a tradition about the event, not testimony that can be examined.

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Judaism: Dialogue with Philosophy revision questions

What does Judaism: Dialogue with Philosophy cover in AQA A-Level Religious Studies?

2 subtopics: judaism and philosophy: the dialogue and evaluating the reasonableness of jewish belief. Each one has its own page with questions and model answers.

How is Judaism: Dialogue with Philosophy organised?

By the AQA 7062 specification, subtopic by subtopic, so it matches the order you are taught it in.