ABSTRACT
In many respects, the contributions of Judaism and Jewish philosophers to the philosophy of religion parallel the contributions made by Christianity and Islam. The concepts and problems addressed by thinkers in the three religions are largely identical: for example, the existence of God, the problem of evil, foreknowledge and free will, the status of divine command morality, creation, and providence. Furthermore, the responses promulgated by Jewish philosophers often converge with responses propounded by Muslim and Christian counterparts. This is hardly surprising, since in the tenth through twelfth centuries it was exposure to Islamic thought that gave rise to the whole Jewish enterprise, and subsequently, in the later Middle Ages, Christian scholasticism exerted signi cant impact on Jewish philosophy (Berger 1997; Rudavsky 2003). Yet, despite the overlap just described, ancient Jewish texts and later Jewish philosophers sometimes contributed incisive ideas, arguments, and approaches that advance discussion and which it would be unfair to label redundant. In addition, certain issues that Jewish philosophers addressed, primarily in the modern period – for example, the meaning of ‘chosenness,’ the bindingness of Sinaitic imperatives, Jewish identity, and Zionism – were endemic to Jewish thought. Notwithstanding the salience in modern times of these more particularistic topics, in what follows the emphasis is on a highly select group of issues that occupy a place in all the theistic religions and are the stuff of analytic philosophy of religion.
