German scholar of philosopher and Judaism Cohen's (1842-1918) essay Charakteristik der Ethik Maimunis first appeared in his 1908 two-volume introduction to medieval and modern Jewish philosophy Moses ben Maimon: Sein Leben, seine Werke und sein Einfluss . Maimonides (1135-1204) was an Egyptian Jewis

In a diverse and innovative selection of new essays by theologians and philosophers, this text examines one of the most primitive yet challenging questions to define human experience - that of why we suffer. As a theme uniting very different religious and cultural traditions, the problem of suffering presents us with conflicts of agency versus passivity, of degradation versus enrichment and of deprivation versus excess. Can the notion of goodness retain meaning in the face of real affliction, or is pain itself in conflict with meaning? And who decides that we must suffer, anyway?

Robert Gibbs presents here an ambitious new theory of ethics. Drawing on a striking combination of intellectual traditions, including Jewish thought, continental philosophy, and American pragmatism, Gibbs argues that ethics is primarily concerned with responsibility and is not--as philosophers have often assumed--principally a matter of thinking about the right thing to do and acting in accordance with the abstract dictates of reason or will. More specifically, ethics is concerned with attending to others' questions and bearing responsibility for what they do.

Gibbs builds this...

The essays assembled here represent the leading Hermann Cohen scholars from the United States, Canada, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Israel. Emerging from their efforts is a new set of explorations both in Cohen's own system and also in his relation to a wide-range of subsequent thinkers. They open Cohen's Ethics of Pure Will in two ways. First, they show us the deep questions that are operating within Cohen's texts, and second they raise questions for ethics itself, particularly in relation to Jewish tradition. That specific topic, the primacy of ethics for Judaism,...