Martin Kavka
Associate
Professor of Religion
|
M05
Dodd Hall
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306
Office: 115
Dodd Hall
Phone: (850)
644-0211
Fax: (850) 644-7225
Email: mkavka@mailer.fsu.edu
Office Hours: TBA
Curriculum
Vitae
Background
Background
Background
My
primary research interest is the discourse of modern Jewish
philosophy, which means that I groove on thinking about how Jews in
the modern West have appropriated the canon of modern Western
philosophy from Kant to Rorty to articulate both Jews’ difference
from and commonality with Western culture. My first book, Jewish
Messianism and the History of Philosophy
(Cambridge University Press, 2004), argued that a significant strand
of thinkers in the modern Jewish philosophical canon (Hermann Cohen,
Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas, with some premonitions in the
writings of Moses Maimonides) grounded their defense of Jewish
messianism in a philosophical account of the nature of nonbeing and
potentiality.
More
recently—since the beginning of the conflict in Iraq—I’ve
become less rosy about Jewish philosophy’s ability and desire to
change the world. And so during the 2007–08 academic year, I am
completing a manuscript entitled The
Perils of Covenant,
which argues that the so-called “covenantal theology” that has
become popular in American Jewish thought since the end of World War
II is politically obsolete at a time when Jews’ and Americans’
“enemies” are no longer godless communists but other
religionists, and philosophically vague insofar as it gives little or
no criterion for evaluating various approaches to sacralizing the
public sphere. In response to these problems, I outline the
beginnings of a Jewish political liberalism that is indebted to
contemporary neopragmatism of the Sellars/Brandom/Stout variety, to
accounts of the vicissitudes of culture in Martin Buber and Emmanuel
Levinas, to the philosophy of education in Franz Rosenzweig, and to
the classical legends of the rabbinic academy at Yavneh.
Finally,
a note about the photo above. My illustrious predecessor in this
position, Richard L. Rubenstein (After
Auschwitz, The Cunning of History,
and much more), once described his view of God as Holy Nothingness in
the image of “God is the ocean and we the waves.” While I am
deeply sympathetic to his view, I believe that it can only be
articulated by a Cartesian mind floating in that ocean, having
separated itself from it in order to see it as its object. It is for
this reason that the desire for universalism and inclusion is a
tragic and illusory one.
Current and (tentatively) future courses
Fall
2007
On leave (and directing a reading course on Rawls and religion)
Spring
2008
On leave (and directing a reading course on Jewish thought and secularization theory)
Fall 2008
- REL 3607 The Jewish Tradition
- REL 6498 Pragmatism & Theology
Spring 2009
- REL 4304 American Judaism
- REL 6498/HUM 5938/ENG 5xxx Political Theology (with Prof. Robin Goodman, English
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