Josef Stern
Office: STU 202B
Email: j06s@midway.uchicago.edu
Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Committee on Jewish Studies, and College
B.A. M.A., Ph.D. (Columbia University)
Professor of Philosophy at Bar-Ilan University
Background:
I had a classical Jewish education: rabbinics, Jewish Rabbinics and Jewish Thought and a long standing interest in philosophy. When you put those things together you get an interest in Medieval Jewish Philosophy and Thought and Medieval Jewish Rabbinics. My philosophical training was almost entirely in Anglo-American philosophy, language, science, and epistemology. I did a bit of graduate work in Modern Jewish Philosophy, but for the most part I am self-taught.
By the end of my graduate education and by the time I came to the University of Chicago, through my work on Nahmanides, I came to Maimonides and Maimonides quickly captured my imagination.
I came to the UC directly from graduate school and I've been here ever since with 8-9 years in the college.
How is the interdisciplinary study within the Committee beneficial:
I see Jewish Studies as fluid, but not a discipline. It should be open and diverse as the people in it. It should cast its net widely and encourage scholars from different fields and various scholarships. So the committee should serve in this capacity.
The doctoral program is problematic. There is really no such thing as Jewish studies. For example if a student studies Jewish history, they should learn the discipline of history and the different ways to study it. You should learn your discipline as a whole and train as a whole. Interdisciplinary is not non-disciplinary it requires master of all the disciplines connected. Students in certain fields should do the work in that main discipline and the committee/center should offer support to the students to enable them to strengthen their skills.
What type of student would benefit working with you:
Students interested in philosophy, or Jewish Philosophy.
What advice would you give them:
To strengthen your credentials within your given interests.
What courses are you teaching now:
Last year I taught courses on: Philosophy of Language and Meaning, Maimonides and Hume on Religion, as well as predoctoral Seminar. Currently I am teaching Judaic Civilization II, and Medieval Philosophy.
What are you working on:
Maimonides: Epistemology and Philosophy of Language.
Publications include:
Among his recent publications are Metaphor in Context, Problems and Parables of Law: Maimonides and Nahmanides on Reasons for the Commandments, "Metaphors in Pictures," and "Maimonides' Demonstrations: Principles and Practice."
"Professor Stern is completing a book entitled The Matter and Form of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed and engaged in research on various topics in the theory of reference, such as demonstratives, indirect discourse, and belief sentences, on normativity in language and the foundations of linguistics, issues of representation in language and art, and on the reception of Quine's indeterminacy thesis as a case study of the transformation of a problem in twentieth century Anglo-American philosophy."