Menachem Fisch
Fisch at Notre Dame, April 2017
Born	(1948-07-30) July 30, 1948 Leeds, England
Alma mater	Tel Aviv University Queen's College, Oxford
Main interests	philosophy of science, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, rationality, normativity, and Jewish philosophy

Menachem Fisch is an Israeli philosopher. He is the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science, and co-Director of the Frankfurt-Tel Aviv Center for the Study of Religious and Interreligious Dynamics at Tel Aviv University. He is also Senior Fellow of the Goethe University's Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Bad Homburg.^[1][2][3]

Fisch has published widely on the history of 19th-century British science and mathematics, on confirmation theory, on rationality and agency, on the theology of the talmudic literature, and the philosophy of talmudic legal reasoning. In recent work he explores the limits of normative self-criticism, the Talmud's dialogism and dispute of religiosity, the historiography and narratology of scientific framework transitions, political emotions, and the possibility of articulating a pluralist and liberal political philosophy from within the assumptions of traditional Judaism. Fisch's current philosophical work focuses on reflexive emotions.

Fisch has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Fellow of the Wissenshaftskolleg, the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, and the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, MIT, senior visiting fellow at Collegium Budapest, visiting scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was a long-term senior research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem.

Awards and honors

February 2004 The Crown-Minnow Lectures at the University of Notre Dame.

In 2016 A volume dedicated to his work, entitled Menachem Fisch: The Rationality of Religious Dispute, was published by Brill as Vol. 18 of The Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers, (eds. H. Samuelson-Tiroshi and A. W. Hughes).

2016 recipient of The Humboldt Prize.^[4]

2017 awarded an honorary doctorate in religious philosophy from the Goethe University, Frankfurt.^[5]

January 2020 The Dagmar Westberg Lectures at the Goethe University, Frankfurt.

In 2020, a collection of engagements with his work entitled: Changing One's Mind: Philosophy, Religion And Science, (edited by. Y. Schwartz, P. Franks and C. Wiese), was published as a special issue of Open Philosophy (3, 2020)

November 2023 The Liss Lecture at the University of Notre Dame.

February 2024 The Yerushah Lecture at the University of Cambridge

Publications

References