Pragmatism and Theology: Between Hasdai Crescas and Charles Peirce

Abstract

AbstractThe noted Jewish scholar Harry Wolfson (d. 1929) claimed in youthful writings that the fifteenth‐century rabbinic thinker and physicist, Hasdai Crescas, was a pragmatist. This essay introduces evidence that there are, indeed, significant analogies between elements of Hasdai Crescas’s critique of Aristotle and elements of Charles Peirce’s pragmatism. The essay concludes that Crescas’s primary work, Light of the Lord (Or Hashem), displays a unique analogue to classical American pragmatism, which analogue I label “rabbinic pragmatism” and classify as a subtype of “Jewish pragmatism.” The essay’s central hypothesis is that Crescas’s scientific reasoning is correlative to his Torah‐based reasoning. A second hypothesis is that the enabling conditions of this correlativity are the inquirer’s relation to God as author of Creation and of the Commandments (mitzvah). I argue that Crescas’s non‐finite mathematics (a potential source for Galileo) is correlative to his account of the non‐finite meanings of each Commandment so that each command displays fresh meanings in each new context of life.