Dr. Paul Franks

Dr. Paul Franks is a Professor of Philosophy at Yale University.Dr. Franks' areas of focus include Kant, German Idealism, Post-Kantian Analytic Philosophy, Neo-Kantianism and Phenomenology, Jewish Philosophy, Early Modern Philosophy, Metaphysics and Episte-mology, and the Philosophy of the Human Sciences.He is the author of many publications on themes in Jewish Philosophy, including: All or Nothing: Systema-ticity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2005); Franz Rosenzweig: Philosophical and Theological Writings (with Michael L. Morgan) (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2000); as well as a number of essays including: "Divided by Common Sense: Mendelssohn and Jacobi on Reason and Inferential Justification," in Moses Mendelssohn's Meta-physics and Aesthetics, ed. Reinier Munk (Dordrecht: Springer 2011), 203-215; and "Inner Anti-Semitism or Kabbalistic Legacy? German Idealism's Relationship to Judaism," in Yearbook of German Idealism, Volume VII, Faith and Reason, eds. Fred Rush, Jürgen Stolzenberg and Paul Franks (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 254-279.

Tuesday, May 20, 2014 6:30-8:00pmUniversity of Denver Sturm Hall, Room 286

Part of the Week of Jewish Philosophy May 20-22, 2014;

visit du.edu/ahss/cjs for a complete listing of events in this series.For more information, or to RSVP, please email cjs@du.edu

CoSponsored by:

(Visiting Professor of Philosophy from Yale University)

Public Lecture:German Idealism and

Jewish MysticismCentral themes of the German Idealism of

Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are drawn from kabbalah. How did this come about and how were these themes deployed and developed?

The translation of thousands of pages of kabbal-istic texts in Sulzbach in the seventeenth

century will be discussed, and the development of kabbalistic ideas by Jacobi, Fichte and

Schelling -- concerning human rights and the capacity for evil -- will be explored.

Wed, May 21, 2014 12:00-3:00pmUniversity of Denver Sturm Hall, Room 286

3-hour Intensive Text Seminar: Jewish Philosophy and Historicism

in Jewish Studies

In 1818-19, the �ield of academic Jewish studies was born at the University of Berlin under the sign of historicism --

a new paradigm as well as a world-view -- which led to important developments in the study of the history of

Jewish philosophy but which gave rise to resistance to the ongoing practice of Jewish philosophy. What is histori-

cism and to what problem is it responding? Can one reject historicism without rejecting history? How has Jewish

philosophy been excluded and how is it still possible and valuable today? How can philosophy be Jewish without

losing its universality? How can something Jewish be philosophical without losing its particularity?