Jerusalem Divided: The Hebrew University’s Philosophy Department Between Rotenstreich and Bar-Hillel

Abstract

Please cite the published versionStudents who looked at the announcements posted in the hallways of the Hebrew University's Givat Ram campus in 1959/60 may have noticed posters inviting them to lectures on philosophical themes. There were two main types of such lectures. At meetings organized by the Philosophical Society, talks were delivered on oriental philosophy and the West (E.W. Tomlin), the philosophy of literature and the image of man (Maurice Feldman), a new book by Nathan Rotenstreich, Spirit and Man (Rotenstreich and Eugène Jacob Fleischmann), and Plato's Timaeus (Joseph Liebes). 1 At meetings of the Israel Society for Logic and the Philosophy of Science, there were talks on finite automata (Michael Rabin), the mechanization of mathematical thought (Abraham Robinson), innovations in combinatorial grammar (Yehoshua Bar-Hillel) and using the WEIZAC computer for statistical sampling (Raphael Bar-On). 2From these examples, it is apparent that the lecture-going public and philosophy students at the Hebrew University were implicitly being called upon to deliberate the merits of, or choose between, two distinct philosophical paths of demarcating the realm of philosophy. Schematically speaking, they were presented with a choice between philosophy conceived as a discipline contiguous with the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, and philosophy conceived