Principles of Judaism

Samuel Lebens takes the three principles of Jewish faith as proposed by Rabbi Joseph Albo (1380-1444) in order to scrutinize and refine them with the toolkit of contemporary analytic philosophy. What could it mean for a perfect being to create a world from nothing? Could our world be anything more than a figment of God's imagination? What is the Torah? What does Judaism expect from a Messiah and what would it mean for a world to be redeemed? These questions are explored in conversation with a wide array of Jewish sources and with an eye towards diverse fields of contemporary research such as cosmology philosophical logic the ontology of literature and the metaphysics of time. <em>The Principles of Judaism</em> articulates the most fundamental axioms of Orthodox Judaism in the vernacular of contemporary philosophy.