Yehuda Halper standing in front of a building, his left hand on his chin
Alumni

Yehuda Halper

Visiting Scholar (Jan 2021-Jun 2021)

Dr.

Yehuda Halper is associate professor in the Department of Jewish Philosophy at Bar Ilan University. His research examines medieval philosophy at the intersections of Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. In particular, he is interested in the reception of Plato and Aristotle in translation among medieval logicians and scientists and how Jewish and Muslim thinkers adopted and adapted Plato and Aristotle to form the building blocks of medieval philosophy and science.

His 2021 book Jewish Socratic Questions in an Age without Plato (Brill, Hamburg Jewish Philosophy Series) won the Goldstein-Goren Book award for the best book in Jewish Thought 2019–2021. He is the director of the Israel Science Foundation–funded project “Hebrew Traditions of Aristotelian Dialectics” and was the co-organizer of the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies research group “The Reception and Impact of Aristotelian Logic in Medieval Jewish Culture” in 2018–19. In 2016, he received the Alon Fellowship for Outstanding Young Researchers. He currently holds the Schneeweiss Chair in Jewish Philosophy and Ethics at Bar Ilan University.

 

Publications

  • Jewish Socratic Questions in an Age Without Plato: Permitting and Forbidding Open-Inquiry in 12–15th century Europe and North Africa. Leiden: Brill, Maimonides Library of Philosophy and Religion 1, 2021

  • "Can the Results of Experience be the Premises of Demonstrations? 400 Years of Debate on a Single Line of Maimonides' Treatise on the Art of Logic", in Premodern Experience of the Natural World in Translation, ed. Katja Krause, Maria Auxent, and Dror Weil (New York: Routledge, 2022), pp. 171-187.

  • "Debate by the Book, about the Book, in a Book: Shem Tob Falaquera's Epistle of the Debate, Al-Fārābī’s Book of Dialectic, and Aristotle's Topics on Philosophy and the Holy Writ," Studia Graeco-Arabica 11.2 (2021): 93-106.

  • "Dialectic and Metaphysical Skepticism in Jacob Anatoli," Theoria 88 (2022): 143-163.“The Only Extant, Complete, and Original Hebrew Commentary on the Entire Metaphysics of Aristotle: Eli Habilio and the Influence of Scotism,” Vivarium: A Journal for Medieval and Early-Modern Philosophy and Intellectual Life 57 (2019): 182-205.

  • "Philosophical Commentary and Supercommentary: The Hebrew Aristotelean Commentaries of the 14th through 16th Centuries." In Medieval Jewish Philosophy and its Literary Forms, ed. Aaron Hughes and James Robinson (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2019), 104-132.

Projects

Premodern History of Signification: Putting Experiences into Words, Images, and Signs

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The Logic of Experience in the Medieval Hebrew Philosophical Tradition

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Presentations, Talks, & Teaching Activities

Truth in Translation: Certainty and Science in Medieval Hebrew Philosophical Writings

Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Sde Boker Campus: Speaking in Tongues: Translation from Historical, Literary, and Cultural Perspectives

The Hebrew Tradition of Aristotelian Dialectics

Sorbonne University, Paris: Revisiting Medieval Dialectics

"Why is Induction Part of Dialectic? Science, Syllogism, and Debate in al-Fārābī's and Averroes's Commentaries on Aristotle's Topica"

Bar Ilan Unviersity. XXVI Annual SIEPM Colloquium 2022: "Dialectic in the Middle Ages: Between Debate and the Foundations of Science

"Are Zeno’s Paradoxes of Motion Fallacies? Evidence from the Hebrew Aristotelian Logical Tradition"

Université de Lille: Fallacies in the Arabic, Byzantine, Hebrew and Latin Traditions

Updates Available? 14th-15th Century Approaches to an Early, Incomplete Non-Tibbonide Translation of Al-Farabi's Dialectic

University of Hamburg: Jewish Scholarship, Arabic Heritage and Christian Culture: The Study of Philosophy and Science among Jews in 14th- and Early 15th-Century Provence and the Development of the Hebrew Language