22 Facts About Yirmiyahu Yovel

Yirmiyahu Yovel was an Israeli philosopher and public intellectual.

Yirmiyahu Yovel was Professor Emeritus of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the New School for Social Research in New York.

Yirmiyahu Yovel was a laureate of the Israel Prize in philosophy and officier of the French order of the Palme academique.

Yirmiyahu Yovel's books were translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Hebrew, Korean and Japanese.

Yirmiyahu Yovel supported his studies as radio news editor and presenter.

Yirmiyahu Yovel came to the university driven by existential philosophical concerns and suspicious of rationalism.

Yirmiyahu Yovel has shared from the start Nietzsche's radical drive to existential lucidity, which can be emotionally taxing but liberating.

Yirmiyahu Yovel holds that the history of philosophy is embedded in most philosophical discourse, and that often it contains issues and insights that can be fruitfully contemporized by a method of immanent reconstruction.

Yirmiyahu Yovel was to return as visiting professor both to Princeton University and the Sorbonne, among other foreign appointments.

Yirmiyahu Yovel was an early advocate of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, and strongly opposed the settlement activity in the West Bank and Gaza as politically wrong and motivated by false Messianism.

Yirmiyahu Yovel's viewers remembered him as a military reporter in the Sinai frontline in both the 1967 and 1973 war.

In 2000 Yirmiyahu Yovel won the Israel Prize for his achievements in philosophy.

Yirmiyahu Yovel argued that these challenges can be tackled by a sober attitude, committed to reason all while accepting its fallibility, finitude, and lack of absolute character.

Yirmiyahu Yovel's published numerous scholarly articles and several books, among them Kant and the Problem of History Spinoza and Other Heretics, Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche and the Jews and The Other Within: The Marranos.

Yirmiyahu Yovel translated into Hebrew two major philosophical classics with systematic introductions, and edited several collective books, including a 5-volume encyclopedia of Jewish modern secular culture.

In wondering what had enabled Spinoza to tear himself so drastically from the Western theistic tradition, Yirmiyahu Yovel did not turn directly to the rational arguments that drove Spinoza, but looked first for the historico-existential situation that cleared the mental space for those arguments to emerge and take hold in the mind.

The answer, Yirmiyahu Yovel suggested, is linked to the dualities and confused religious identity of the peculiar Jewish group from which Spinoza came, the so-called Marranos, who before arriving in Holland had lived for generations in Spain and Portugal as forced converts from Judaism, absorbing Christian symbols, mental patterns and ways of thinking.

Yirmiyahu Yovel insists that this contextualization is not reductive: Spinoza's ideas have an independent rational import that cannot be reduced to the historical circumstances that allowed them to arise.

Yirmiyahu Yovel thus became, involuntarily, a founding father of almost all the forms of modern life in which he himself did not participate.

Yirmiyahu Yovel takes the reader into the latent and overt conversation with Spinoza in the work of Kant, Hegel, the left-Hegelians, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud - all of whom shared a core philosophy of immanence but worked it out in rival ways, which diverge from Spinoza's.

Yirmiyahu Yovel therefore expects urged the Jews to become secularized, to mix with other Europeans, to excel in all European affairs and eventually set new standards and values to them.

Yirmiyahu Yovel's book argues it is impossible to attribute any integral and univocal identity to the Marranos, neither Jewish nor Hispano-Catholic, since it was, precisely, the disintegration of the compact characteristic of medieval society which is the most distinctive and interesting feature of these people, and one of the main contributions they made to early-modern Europe.