Paul
Nahme

Brown University

Research Topic

Divine Logic: Hokhmat Talmud as the Subversion of Reason in the Talmudic Analysis (lomdus) of R. Shimon Shkop and R. Moshe Avigdor Amiel

Bio

Paul E. Nahme is the Dorot Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies and Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. Professor Nahme received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and has also studied Rabbinic Literature and Jewish Law at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah. He taught previously at the University of Kansas and was formerly a fellow at the NYU School of Law and Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. His research interests focus on modern Jewish philosophy such as Cohen, Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Strauss; and Rabbinic thought, particularly the traditions of Brisk and Telshe; intellectual history, religion, ethics, and politics, and the philosophy and hermeneutics of law. His current book examines the philosophy of Hermann Cohen in the context of late 19th-Century Wilhelmine Germany and interrogates Cohen’s response to the philosophical problem of secularity for German-Jews living in a Protestant state.

Fellowship

2015–2016

Exploring aspects of internal life that lie beyond reason—emotions and feelings, the unconscious, sensation, imagination, impulse, intuition, and the nonrational dimensions of reason itself.