Fellows
Menachem Fisch is awarded an honorary doctorate for his religious-philosophical research

The Faculty of Protestant Theology at Goethe University will honor the Israeli scholar of religious philosophy Menachem Fisch at a symposium and conferment ceremony.

In the summer semester 2017, Menachem Fisch will be awarded an honorary doctorate by the Faculty of Protestant Theology of the Goethe University »for his pioneering contributions to the history and philosophy of science, the philosophy of self and dialogue, Talmudic reasoning and theology, and to the study of interreligious dynamics«.

Menachem Fisch, June 2017 (Foto: Till van Rahden)

A symposium will take place in his honor on Monday, July 10, 2017 at Goethe University (2:15 pm, Casino 1.801) and will be devoted to Professor Fisch’s main research interest: »Science, Religion and the Rationality of Ambiguity«. Keynote speakers at the symposium will be, among others, Lorraine Daston, professor of the history of science at the Max-Plank Institute for the History of Science in Berlin; Simon Goldhill, professor of Greek literature and culture at Cambridge University; and Heiko Schulz, professor of the philosophy of religion at Goethe University in Frankfurt.

The honorary doctorate will be conferred upon Professor Fisch by the Dean of the Faculty, Melanie Köhlmoos, at a ceremony directly following the symposium at 6:00 pm. The honorific speech will be given by Christian Wiese, Martin Buber Professor of Jewish Religious Philosophy at Goethe University. Menachem Fisch will then give a speech entitled »Lost for Words. Rethinking Normative Ambivalence«. The general public is warmly invited to attend the ceremony: Goethe University, Gasino-Gebäude, Festsaal 823, Norbert-Wolheim-Platz 1, 60323 Frankfurt. The details of the symposium and conferment ceremony can be found here.

About Menachem Fisch

Menachem Fisch is the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Professor emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science, director of the Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies (CRIS) and the former chair of the Graduate School of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He is also senior research fellow at the Kogod Center for the Renewal of Jewish Thought at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He was awarded the Humboldt Research Prize in 2016.

He has worked closely with Christian Wiese, professor of Jewish religious philosophy at Goethe University, for many years and it was Professor Wiese who invited him to the Forschungskolleg for the first time in the summer of 2013. In the academic year 2016/17 he has returned to our institute as a fellow for the second time, again at the invitation of Christian Wiese and institute Director Matthias Lutz Bachmann.

Among his most important publications are the monographs: The View from Within: Normativity and the Limits of Self-Criticism, Notre Dame 2011 (with Y. Benbaji); Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture, Indiana 1997; ›To Know Wisdom‹ – Science, Rationality and Torah-study, Tel Aviv 1994 (Hebrew); William Whewell: Philosopher of Science, Oxford 1991. His book Creatively Undecided: Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency will appear in December 2017, published by Chicago University Press. The Brill Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers recently devoted a volume to the work of Menachem Fisch entitled The Rationality of Religious Dispute (2016, edited by H. Tirosh-Samuelson und A. Hughes).