Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy

Benjamin Pollock argues that Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption is devoted to a singularly ambitious philosophical task: grasping 'the All' - the whole of what is - in the form of a system. In asserting Rosenzweig's abiding commitment to a systematic conception of philosophy, this book breaks rank with the assumptions about Rosenzweig's thought that have dominated recent scholarship. Indeed, the Star's importance is often claimed to lie precisely in the way it opposes philosophy's traditional drive for systematic knowledge and upholds instead a 'new thinking' attentive to the existential concerns, the alterity, and even the revelatory dimension of concrete human life. Pollock shows that these very innovations in Rosenzweig's thought are in fact to be understood as part and parcel of the Star's systematic program. But this is only the case, Pollock claims, because Rosenzweig approaches philosophy's traditional task of system in a radically original manner.

Introduction: The Star of Redemption as 'system of philosophy'; 1. System as task of philosophy: 'the oldest system-program of German idealism'; 2. 'A twofold relation to the absolute': the genesis of Rosenzweig's concept of system; 3. Alls or nothings: the starting-point of Rosenzweig's system; 4. 'The genuine notion of revelation': relations, reversals, and the human being in the middle of the system; 5. Seeing stars: the vision of the all and the completion of the system; Conclusion: the all and the everyday.

Benjamin Pollock is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. He is author of articles in the philosophy of religion and in modern Jewish philosophy appearing in AJS Review, Jewish Studies Quarterly, and other leading journals, and he is co-editor with Michael Morgan of The Philosopher as Witness: Fackenheim and Responses to the Holocaust.