Understanding The Sick And The Healthy: A View Of World, Man, And God, With A New Introduction By Hilary Putnam: a view of world, man, and God

The Story

Franz Rosenzweig, one of the century's great Jewish thinkers, wrote his gem of a book in 1921 as a more accessible precis of his famous Star of Redemption. An elegant introduction to Rosenzweig's 'new thinking,' Understanding the Sick and the Healthy was written for a lay audience and takes the form of an ironic narrative about convalescence. With superb simplicity and beauty, it puts forth an important critique of the nineteenth-century German Idealist philosophical tradition and expresses a powerful vision of Jewish religion. Harvard's Hilary Putnam provides a new introduction to this classic work for a contemporary audience.'Today, more than three-quarters of a century after it was written, the critique of philosophy in this book is what makes it of such great interest. Critique of philosophy has been a central theme of twentieth-century philosophy, and many philosophers have attacked some of the targets that Rosenzweig attacked in his little book. Yet this early attack by a profound religious thinker is far more powerful and far more interesting than most.'--From the new introduction by Hilary Putnam