Menachem Fisch
Biographic Data
| ID | 3785209 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Menachem Fisch |
| GIVEN NAMES | Menachem |
| FAMILY NAME | Fisch |
| SIGNATURE | FISCH M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tel Aviv University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Reflexive Emotions: Shame, Humor, Humility
Appreciating the Comical
Connected Heresy: The Talmudic Literature's Heretic Religiosity
Heretic" is commonly understood as a perspectival term employed by insiders to describe a specific kind of outsider, namely, one who, not only holds to seriously objectionable positions, but having been one of us, should know better. Accordingly, "heretic religiosity" denotes for members of the mother religion a dissenting form of religiosity that deviates too sharply from their own to be contained within it. Michael Walzer's well-known idea of c…
The Tragic Paradox of Political Zionism
Introduction Michael Walzer's Paradox of Liberation argues convincingly that the very success of national liberation is often the cause of its radical undoing. He compares three cases of successful struggles for liberation—Israel and India in 1948 and Algeria in 1962—all by secular liberation movements committed to Western values. And yet, in the states that they created a politics rooted in what we can loosely call fundamentalist religion is tod…
Job and the Bible's Theo-Political Divide
The book of Job presents a unique and detailed contrastive study of two fundamental and fundamentally opposed religious personae: Job, on the one hand, and the collective image of his friends on the other. It is a normative dispute about the religion's most basic norm of disposition. How is one to respond to inexplicable disaster when one believes one is blameless? What is the religiously appropriate response to catastrophe? To confront God's jud…
Gulliver and the Rabbis: Counterfactual Truth in Science and the Talmud
The paper presents Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels as the first systematic attempt to claim that the normal methods of testing belief and opinion for clarity, consistence, coherence, and how they stand to the facts are powerless when applied to deep-seated normative commitments, or what Wittgenstein dubbed "framework truths." To subject our norms to normative critique requires a measure of self-alienation that cannot be achieved merely by loo…
Babbage's two lives
Babbage wrote two relatively detailed, yet significantly incongruous, autobiographical accounts of his pre-Cambridge and Cambridge days. He published one in 1864 and in it advertised the existence of the other, which he carefully retained in manuscript form. The aim of this paper is to chart in some detail for the first time the discrepancies between the two accounts, to compare and assess their relative credibility, and to explain their author's…
How and Why I Write History of Science
I have always been a philosopher at heart. I write history of science and history of its philosophy primarily as a philosopher wary of his abstractions and broad conceptualizations. But that has not always been the case. Lakatos famously portrayed history of science as the testing ground for theories of scientific rationality. But he did so along the crudest Hegelian lines that did injury both to Hegel and to the history and methodology of scienc…
Taking the Linguistic Turn Seriously
Science studies the world, but does not include itself in it. The task of systematically studying science falls to the humanities. The problem is that philosophers who take recent developments in philosophy seriously are forced to deny any credence to the self-image of science as a steadily progressive, self-critical enterprise, while philosophers who take what scientists do and feel more seriously, are forced to ignore some of the most profound …
A modest proposal: Towards a religious politics of epistemic humility
The gravest challenge to orthodox Judaism is not that of coexisting peacefully with communities whose forms of life it considers religiously objectionable but that of taking responsibility for the management of such peaceful coexistence. Government is required not merely to turn a blind eye to the conduct of such communities but to take active responsibility for their security, well-being and capacity to flourish according to their custom and con…
Astronomical Exegesis: An Early Modern Jewish Interpretation of the Heavens
Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture
a fascinating and thought-provoking book... -The Jewish Quarterly The best introduction to the talmudic literature that is available...An extraordinarily important book, brilliant, and lucid. -Daniel Boyarin Fisch has written a rich, thoughtful book. One will come away from Rational Rabbis with a deeper understanding of just what the Talmud is. -Hilary Putnam Talmudic culture is often viewed as bound by its traditions. Menachem Fisch maintains th…
Eccleciastes (Qohelet) in Context — A Study of Wisdom as Constructive Skepticism
Toward a rational theory of progress
The emergency which has arrived’: The problematic history of nineteenth-century British algebra – a programmatic outline
More than any other aspect of the Second Scientific Revolution, the remarkable revitalization or British mathematics and mathematical physics during the first half of the nineteenth century is perhaps the most deserving of the name. While the newly constituted sciences of biology and geology were undergoing their first revolution, as it were, the reform of British mathematics was truly and self-consciously the story of a second coming of age. ‘Di…
Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain. Richard Yeo
Necessary and contingent truth in William Whewell's antithetical theory of knowledge
Whewell's Consilience of Inductions–An Evaluation
The paper attempts to elucidate and evaluate William Whewell's notion of a “consilience of inductions.“ In section I Whewellian consilience is defined and shown to differ considerably from what latter-day writers talk about when they use the term. In section II a primary analysis of consilience is shown to yield two types of consilient processes, one in which one of the lower-level laws undergoes a conceptual change (the case aptly discussed in B…
Whewell's Consilience of Inductions–An Evaluation
The paper attempts to elucidate and evaluate William Whewell's notion of a “consilience of inductions.“ In section I Whewellian consilience is defined and shown to differ considerably from what latter-day writers talk about when they use the term. In section II a primary analysis of consilience is shown to yield two types of consilient processes, one in which one of the lower-level laws undergoes a conceptual change (the case aptly discussed in B…
Necessary and contingent truth in William Whewell's antithetical theory of knowledge
The emergency which has arrived’: The problematic history of nineteenth-century British algebra – a programmatic outline
More than any other aspect of the Second Scientific Revolution, the remarkable revitalization or British mathematics and mathematical physics during the first half of the nineteenth century is perhaps the most deserving of the name. While the newly constituted sciences of biology and geology were undergoing their first revolution, as it were, the reform of British mathematics was truly and self-consciously the story of a second coming of age. ‘Di…
Toward a rational theory of progress
Necessary and contingent truth in William Whewell's antithetical theory of knowledge
Whewell's Consilience of Inductions–An Evaluation
The paper attempts to elucidate and evaluate William Whewell's notion of a “consilience of inductions.“ In section I Whewellian consilience is defined and shown to differ considerably from what latter-day writers talk about when they use the term. In section II a primary analysis of consilience is shown to yield two types of consilient processes, one in which one of the lower-level laws undergoes a conceptual change (the case aptly discussed in B…
Toward a rational theory of progress
The emergency which has arrived’: The problematic history of nineteenth-century British algebra – a programmatic outline
More than any other aspect of the Second Scientific Revolution, the remarkable revitalization or British mathematics and mathematical physics during the first half of the nineteenth century is perhaps the most deserving of the name. While the newly constituted sciences of biology and geology were undergoing their first revolution, as it were, the reform of British mathematics was truly and self-consciously the story of a second coming of age. ‘Di…
Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain. Richard Yeo
Eccleciastes (Qohelet) in Context — A Study of Wisdom as Constructive Skepticism
Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture
a fascinating and thought-provoking book... -The Jewish Quarterly The best introduction to the talmudic literature that is available...An extraordinarily important book, brilliant, and lucid. -Daniel Boyarin Fisch has written a rich, thoughtful book. One will come away from Rational Rabbis with a deeper understanding of just what the Talmud is. -Hilary Putnam Talmudic culture is often viewed as bound by its traditions. Menachem Fisch maintains th…
Astronomical Exegesis: An Early Modern Jewish Interpretation of the Heavens
A modest proposal: Towards a religious politics of epistemic humility
The gravest challenge to orthodox Judaism is not that of coexisting peacefully with communities whose forms of life it considers religiously objectionable but that of taking responsibility for the management of such peaceful coexistence. Government is required not merely to turn a blind eye to the conduct of such communities but to take active responsibility for their security, well-being and capacity to flourish according to their custom and con…
Taking the Linguistic Turn Seriously
Science studies the world, but does not include itself in it. The task of systematically studying science falls to the humanities. The problem is that philosophers who take recent developments in philosophy seriously are forced to deny any credence to the self-image of science as a steadily progressive, self-critical enterprise, while philosophers who take what scientists do and feel more seriously, are forced to ignore some of the most profound …
How and Why I Write History of Science
I have always been a philosopher at heart. I write history of science and history of its philosophy primarily as a philosopher wary of his abstractions and broad conceptualizations. But that has not always been the case. Lakatos famously portrayed history of science as the testing ground for theories of scientific rationality. But he did so along the crudest Hegelian lines that did injury both to Hegel and to the history and methodology of scienc…
Babbage's two lives
Babbage wrote two relatively detailed, yet significantly incongruous, autobiographical accounts of his pre-Cambridge and Cambridge days. He published one in 1864 and in it advertised the existence of the other, which he carefully retained in manuscript form. The aim of this paper is to chart in some detail for the first time the discrepancies between the two accounts, to compare and assess their relative credibility, and to explain their author's…
Job and the Bible's Theo-Political Divide
The book of Job presents a unique and detailed contrastive study of two fundamental and fundamentally opposed religious personae: Job, on the one hand, and the collective image of his friends on the other. It is a normative dispute about the religion's most basic norm of disposition. How is one to respond to inexplicable disaster when one believes one is blameless? What is the religiously appropriate response to catastrophe? To confront God's jud…
Gulliver and the Rabbis: Counterfactual Truth in Science and the Talmud
The paper presents Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels as the first systematic attempt to claim that the normal methods of testing belief and opinion for clarity, consistence, coherence, and how they stand to the facts are powerless when applied to deep-seated normative commitments, or what Wittgenstein dubbed "framework truths." To subject our norms to normative critique requires a measure of self-alienation that cannot be achieved merely by loo…
The Tragic Paradox of Political Zionism
Introduction Michael Walzer's Paradox of Liberation argues convincingly that the very success of national liberation is often the cause of its radical undoing. He compares three cases of successful struggles for liberation—Israel and India in 1948 and Algeria in 1962—all by secular liberation movements committed to Western values. And yet, in the states that they created a politics rooted in what we can loosely call fundamentalist religion is tod…
Reflexive Emotions: Shame, Humor, Humility
Appreciating the Comical
Connected Heresy: The Talmudic Literature's Heretic Religiosity
Heretic" is commonly understood as a perspectival term employed by insiders to describe a specific kind of outsider, namely, one who, not only holds to seriously objectionable positions, but having been one of us, should know better. Accordingly, "heretic religiosity" denotes for members of the mother religion a dissenting form of religiosity that deviates too sharply from their own to be contained within it. Michael Walzer's well-known idea of c…
Philosophy (16 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · History (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Philosophy and History of Science (6 works) · Sociology (5 works) · History (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Philosophy of science (4 works) · Political science (4 works)