Devotional Intelligence and Jewish Religious Thinking

This groundbreaking neo-Maimonidean work establishes, on independently philosophical grounds, the intellectual warrant of Jewish religious thinking as "e;devotional intelligence."e; It demonstrates the purchase and intellectual authority of such thinking by appeal to two dialectically interrelated principles: on the one hand, the metaphysical principle that knowing is of being; and, on the other, "e;sacral attunement,"e; a normative principle. Part I distinguishes this study from leading work in contemporary philosophy of Judaism. It introduces the game-changing bid to privilege "e;intelligence"e; in the onto-epistemological Aristotelian sense, over epistemologically orchestrated, post-Enlightenment "e;reason"e; when it comes to assessing the intellectual soundness of religious thinking. Part II distills contemporary elements of Aristotle's onto-epistemological psychology of intelligence that Maimonides incorporated in his philosophy of Jewish religious thinking. Further, it finds in Hegel a bridge between Maimonides' account of devotional intelligence and a modern Maimonidean "e;science of knowing"e; dedicated to religious thinking. Part III turns to "e;sacral attunement,"e; foregrounding the normative "e;devotional"e; aspect of devotional intelligence. It probes the intentionality of both onto-epistemological attunement and the "e;sacred"e; relative to "e;the factor of the transcendent."e; In the process it identifies and applies elements of an existential phenomenology of "e;fundamental attunement"e; that thematize defining realities of the sacral attunement unique to normative Jewish covenantal praxis. A related analysis of "e;the sacred"e; in religious thinking follows, which segues to a chapter on the "e;factor of the transcendent"e; as a seminal constituent of meaning in both the sciences and religion. Part IV applies and amplifies key findings in light of a signature Jewish devotional theme: the divine names, approached from a signally Maimonidean, apophatic position indexed to the factor of the transcendent as the "e;unconditioned condition"e; (Kant) of intelligible meaning as such. Distinguishing what the divine names indicate from what they refer to, the essay concludes by substantiating the intellectual warrant of Jewish religious thinking as a devotional intelligence of the relation-of identity-in-difference-between the attributive names and the Tetragrammaton.