(Ten essays, which constitute the critical sequence of thi...)
Ten essays, which constitute the critical sequence of this penetrating book, are derived from lectures, and from separate publications, many of which are not readily available now. They include discussions of Immortality and Resurrection in the Philosophy of the Church Fathers; St. Augustine and the Pelagian Controversy; Causality and Freedom in Descartes, Leibniz and Hume. Wolfson concludes with a perceptive distillation of his personal wisdom in an essay, contrasting the professed atheist with the "verbal theist".
(In his monumental "Philosophy of the Kalam" the late Harr...)
In his monumental "Philosophy of the Kalam" the late Harry Wolfson examined the early medieval system of Islamic philosophy. He studies its repercussions in Jewish thought in this companion book - an indispensable work for all students of Jewish and Islamic traditions.
Harry Austryn Wolfson was an American scholar of Hebrew literature and philosophy, as well as historian, who spent half a century as Harvard University's Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy. He was a leading historian of medieval philosophy in Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Besides, Harry was the author of a number of books and articles.
Background
Harry Austryn Wolfson was born on November 2, 1887, in Astryna, Vilna Governorate, Russian Empire (present-day Astryna, Grodno Region, Belarus). He was a son of Max Mendel Wolfson and Sarah Dvorah (Savitsky) Wolfson. Max taught Russian and Hebrew, while Sarah, a housewife, ran a traditional Jewish home.
Education
Wolfson received a thorough traditional education in the legendary Yeshivas Knesses Yisrael (Slabodka) (now located in Bnei Brak, Israel), under Rabbi Moshe Mordechai Epstein, as well as in yeshivots of Kovno and Vilna before abject poverty and oppression by the czarist regime caused his family to join the great emigration to America. In 1903, following his father, Wolfson arrived in the United States. For the next two years, he attended Rabbi Isaac Elhanon Yeshiva (present-day Yeshiva University) in New York City.
In his later years, Harry settled down in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he supported himself by part-time Hebrew teaching, while he completed the requirements for his new homeland's high school curriculum. A $250 scholarship, won by a competitive examination, brought Wolfson to Harvard University. At Harvard, Wolfson concentrated his studies in Semitic languages and literature. He studied with world-famous scholars, including George Foot Moore in the history of religions, William R. Arnold in Bible and David Gordon Lyon in Assyriology. Lyon and Moore were his mentors. Besides, Wolfson also came under the influence of George Santayana, the poet and philosopher.
In 1911, Harry earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University, then followed up with a traveling fellowship in Europe. He spent two years, visiting the great libraries in Vatican, Paris, London and Vienna in order to exhume, annotate and classify scores of neglected Hebrew texts. With these two years behind him, he went home to Harvard to earn his Doctor of Philosophy degree, which he received in 1915.
Also, in his early years, Wolfson was immersed in rigorous Talmudic textual methodology and interpretation, an approach to scholarship, that was to shape his later historical and philosophical analysis and thinking.
Moreover, Harry received honorary degrees from ten different universities.
In 1915, Wolfson became an instructor in the fledgling Department of Hebrew Language and Literature at Harvard University. He held the post till 1921, when he was promoted to the position of an associate professor. In addition, he was invited in 1923 to teach part-time at the newly founded Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City. Harry commuted between the two establishments until 1925, when, thanks to a wealthy Harvard alumnus, named Lucius Littauer, who was looking for a suitable way to memorialize his father, Wolfson became the Nathan Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy. The appointment was a double coup. Not only was Wolfson the first professor to occupy this post, but he was also the first in any American university to occupy a chair, devoted solely to Jewish studies.
It was not long before Harry proved himself worthy of the great honor to hold the post of the Nathan Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy. A stream of scholarly papers and books entrenched Jewish studies firmly within the realm of humanistic research in the United States, while close attention to the university library's acquisitions on all his topics of interest soon built the Judaica Collection into one of the country's finest research resources.
Wolfson wrote many books and articles, primarily on Jewish, Christian and Islamic philosophy. His research was devoted to an examination of the structure and growth of philosophy, stretching between the writings of Philo Judaeus, a first-century Jewish thinker, who had lived in Alexandria, Egypt, and those of Baruch Spinoza, a 17th-century Jewish counterpart in Amsterdam.
Although few other scholars dared to undertake the daunting task of studying Spinoza's works, Wolfson tackled the project with enthusiasm, publishing "The Philosophy of Spinoza" in 1934, following up with "Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity and Islam" in 1947. Finally, over a period of years, he produced "The Structure and Growth of Philosophic Systems from Plato to Spinoza", which tied together these two works plus several others, published on Christianity and Islam.
Wolfson had a particular method of analyzing even the most intricate philosophic texts. He called it the hypothetico-deductive method or the method of conjecture and verification, which was the traditional way, in which Talmud had been taught in the Lithuanian yeshivot.
Although each of the long-dead philosophers Harry examined were worthy of lifetime study, Wolfson did not confine his attention to them. His other major works included "Crescas' Critique of Aristotle: Problems of Aristotle's Physics in Jewish and Arabic Philosophy" (1929), "The Philosophy of the Church Fathers" (1956) and "The Philosophy of the Kalam" (1976). In addition, a number of his essays were collected and published as "Religious Philosophy: A Group of Essays" (1961).
It's worth noting, that Harry was editor-in-chief of the publication "Corpus Commentariorum Averrois in Aristotelem", which consists of critical editions of the manuscripts of the Islamic philosopher Averroes (Ibn-Rushd), including the originals in Arabic, the Hebrew and Latin translations, as well as the English translations and explanatory comments by the editors. Also, he was the first chairman of the Judaic Studies Center in the United States.
After Wolfson retired, in 1958, from Harvard University, he continued to write and carry out his study, leaving a memory of distinguished scholarship behind him, when he died of cancer in 1974.
When people asked Harry to describe his own beliefs he said, that he was "a nonobservant orthodox Jew".
Views
Wolfson viewed Philo as the originator of a philosophical trend because, living during a time of increasing Hellenization, he had found ways to interpret the incoming Greek philosophy "in terms of certain fundamental teachings of Hebrew Scripture". Adopted first by Christian thinkers and then by scholars of Islam, Philo's ideas influenced all of medieval philosophy until Spinoza arrived on the intellectual scene to pose maddeningly rational questions, that challenged an all-accepting Jewish faith. Despite his presence in a metaphysically-conscious academic era, Spinoza was excommunicated by the Jewish community. Nevertheless, he left his massively detailed Ethics as a permanent record of his scholarship.
It's also worth noting, that Professor Wolfson's assessment went counter to the conventional wisdom, that, as he put it, "everything that came before Christianity is to be considered only as preparatory to it and everything that happened outside of Christianity is to be considered only as tributary to it".
Wolfson's method in his writing was to make explicit the processes of a philosopher's thought, calling it the "hypothetico-deductive method of textual study". Akin to the method, used to study the Talmud, known as pilpul, this method rests on the assumptions, that any serious author writes with such care and precision, that "every term, expression, generalization or exception is significant not so much for what it states as for what it implies", and that the thought of any serious author is consistent. Hence, it becomes the task of the interpreter to clarify what a given author meant, rather than what he said, and he must resolve apparent contradictions by means of harmonistic interpretation. All this requires great sensitivity to the nuances and implications of the text and familiarity with the literature, on which a given author drew. Like the scientific method, the "hypothetico-deductive" method proceeds by means of hypotheses, which must be proved or disproved, and it must probe the "latent processes" of an author's thought.
Membership
Harry was a member of many learned societies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and the American Academy for Jewish Research and served as its president from 1935 to 1937.
American Academy for Jewish Research
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United States
1935 - 1937
American Oriental Society
,
United States
1957 - 1958
Personality
Wolfson was popularly viewed as a cloistered scholar, obsessed with his writing and teaching. He had a wide circle of friends and students.
Wolfson spoke English with a thick accent, but always graciously. His talks were alive with wit, and he had the gift of making the obscure plain.
Connections
Constantly immersed in his academic work, Wolfson never found time to marry.
Erwin S. Wolfson, a renowned builder, was Harry's nephew.
Philosophers and Scholars: Wolfson, Guttmann and Strauss on the History of Jewish Philosophy
Jonathan Cohen brings together the views of three of the greatest scholar-thinkers in the area of Jewish philosophy of the twentieth century, Harry Austryn Wolfson (1887-1974), Julius Guttmann (1880-1950) and Leo Strauss (1899-1973). Each thinker's construction of Jewish philosophy is presented through individual definitions of Judaism and philosophy, understandings of its historical development and analyses of the canons, used in interpretations of Jewish philosophical texts.