Aryeh Botwinick
Professor
464 Gladfelter Hall
E-mail: aryeh.botwinick@temple.edu
Phone: 215-204-1484
fax: 215-204-3770
Bio: Aryeh Botwinick received his Ph.D. from the Inter-Disciplinary Program in Political Philosophy at Princeton University in 1973. He teaches regularly within the Department upper-class electives and graduate courses in political theory. Among the courses that he teaches on a regular basis are Classical Political Philosophy, Ancient and Medieval Political Philosophy, Modern Political Philosophy, Introduction to Political Philosophy, Seminar in Political Philosophy, Theories of Justice, Contemporary Theories of Democracy, American Political Thought, and 19th and 20th Century Political Philosophy. He received the College of Liberal Arts Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2008.
Since the publication of his book, Skepticism , Belief, and the Modern: Maimonides to Nietzsche (Cornell University Press, 1997), he has been working to reconfigure and rearticulate the relationship between Western monotheism and Western secularism. He has tried to highlight a continuity of logical structure between key interpretations of monotheism and key readings of philosophical liberalism. The projects that he is currently working on as continuations of the earlier work are:
- Experience without Arrest: The Skeptical Philosophical Vision of Michael Oakeshott
- The Communities of the Question: Negative Theology in Western Monotheism
- Negative Theory and Negative Theology: Emmanuel Levinas and the Human Good
- Rabbinic Theology: Its Metaphysical Presuppositions and Political Implications.
Selected Publications
Books
- Skepticism and Political Participation (Temple University Press, January 1990).
- Power and Empowerment: A Radical Theory of Participatory Democracy-Co-authored with Peter Bachrach (Temple University Press, May 1992).
- Postmodernism and Democratic Theory (Temple University Press, April 1993).
- Democracy and Vision Co-edited with William Connolly (Princeton University Press, August, 2001).
Articles
- Political Abuse of a Biblical Paradigm: The Case of the Akeidah
- The Qu’ran as a Negative Theological Text: The Evidence of Sura II
Spring 2012
Political Science 8402 – History of Political Theory I (Classical Political Philosophy) – Thursday 3:00-5:30 Prof. Aryeh Botwinick abotwini@temple.edu
This course builds upon the argument I have recently developed in my book, Michael Oakeshott’s Skepticism (Princeton Monographs in Philosophy Series; Princeton University Press, 2011) to re-envision the relationship between the Western past and the Western present. The upshot of my reading is that an awareness of skepticism and its limits and dilemmas is present in Western thought at least from the time of Plato onward, and is integral to the reception of Greek ideas in both the medieval and post-medieval periods. In an important sense this suggests that Western thought consists in in one vast stationary moment characterized by preoccupation with skepticism and the dilemmas that it engenders. The texts that we shall address in the light of this organizing perspective come from Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Anselm of Canterbury, Moses Maimonides, and Nicholas of Cusa.
Website: Personal Website