Simone Luzzatto’s Scepticism in the Context of Early Modern Thought

Download or read book Simone Luzzatto’s Scepticism in the Context of Early Modern Thought written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-03-04 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the most recent research on Jewish scepticism was inspired by the work of the early modern Venetian rabbi Simone Luzzatto, the first thinker in the history of Jewish thought to declare himself a sceptic and a follower of the New Academy. This collected volume shines new light on the intimate relationship between Luzzatto’s sceptical thinking and an era marked by paradoxes and contrasts between religious devotion and scientific rationalism, as well as between the rabbinic-biblical Jewish tradition and the open tendency towards engagement with non-Jewish philosophical, literary, scientific, and theological cultures. It plots out an original path along which to understand Luzzatto’s scepticism by pointing to the various facets of being a Jewish sceptic in seventeenth-century Italy.