Academic

Jacobson on Prophecy & Expertise

By Lawrence Solum

Arthur J. Jacobson (Cardozo Law School) has posted Prophecy as Expertise (Hebraic Political Studies, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 329-336, Fall 2009) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

At the beginning of his "Tractatus," Baruch Spinoza encounters a dilemma of prophecy, that one must have prophetic knowledge in order to know with certainty who it is that has prophetic knowledge. He escapes, or believes he escapes, this dilemma by asserting a democracy of knowledge, that all men have adequate knowledge of the divine, at least of the two attributes of the divine about which men have, in principle, equal knowledge and which form what we know as natural knowledge. Later in the "Tractatus," however, Spinoza implicitly acknowledges that natural knowledge is democratic in principle only, not in fact, and that the dilemma of prophecy recurs as a dilemma of expertise. It is Maimonides, not Spinoza, who is able to establish a true democracy of knowledge untroubled by any of these dilemmas and in so doing transforms prophecy into philosophy and science. He accomplishes this by means of a legal presumption.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on December 22, 2010 (boomark / email).