Prof. Menachem Fisch holds the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Chair for History and Philosophy of Science, is Chair of the Graduate School of Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies, at Tel Aviv University. He is also Senior Fellow of the Kogod Center for the Renewal of Jewish Thought at the Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem.
He is former President of the Israel Society for History and Philosophy of Science, and former Chair of the National Committee for History and Philosophy of Science at the Israel Academy of Science.
He has held visiting research positions at Queen’s College, Oxford; Trinity College, Cambridge; Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; the Dibner Institute for Advanced Study in the History of Science and Technology, MIT; the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Collegium Budapest; and the Frankfurt University, Institute for Advanced Studes in the Humanities, Bad Homburg.
His publications include: William Whewell Philosopher of Science, Oxford University Press (1991); Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture, Indiana University Press (1997); "A Modest Proposal: Toward a Religious Politics of Epistemic Humility", Journal of Human Rights (2003); "Through Thick and the Thin: a New Defense of Cultural Relativism", Southern Journal of Philosophy (2004) (with Y. Benbaji); "Canon, controverse et réforme; une réflexion sur l'autre voix du judaïsme talmudique", Les Cahiers du judaisme, 18 (2005); "Diversity, Tolerance, Sovereignty", in M. Walzer (ed.), Law, Politics, and Morality in Judaism, Princeton University Press, 2006; "Taking the Linguistic Turn Seriously", The European Legacy (2008); "Judaism, and the Religious Crisis of Modern Science", in J.M. van der Meer and S. Mandelbrote (eds.), Nature & Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions: 1700-Present, Brill, Leiden, (2008); "Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency", The Monist (2010); andThe View from Within: Normativity and the Limits of Self Criticism (with Y. Benbaji), The University of Notre Dame Press (2011); “Science, Religion, and Rationality – A Neo-Hegelian Approach”, The Toronto Journal of Theology (2013); “How and Why I Write History of Science”, Science in Context, (2013); “Babbage’s Two Lives”, The British for the History of Science (2014); “Judaism and the Religious Value of Diversity and Dialogue: Drafting a Jewish Response to Nostra Aetate”, in S. Alkier, M. Schneider, Ch. Wiese (eds.), Diversität - Differenz - Dialogoizität: Religion in Pluralen Kontexten, de Gruyter (2015).
A volume dedicated to his work, entitled The Rationality of Religious Dispute, is forthcoming as Vol. 17 of the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers, (eds. H. Samuelson-Tiroshi and A. W. Hughes), Brill (2015).
Menachem Fisch is Chair of the Cohn Institute’s Board and Academic Committee, and is Co-Editor of HOPOS, The Journal of the International Society for the History of the Philosophy of Science
