About Eli Friedlander

Eli Friedlander is Professor of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He received his PhD from Harvard writing his dissertation under the supervision of Stanley Cavell and Burton Dreben on the different manifestations of the distinction between showing and saying in logic, ethics and aesthetics.

His first book Signs of Sense: Reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus (Harvard UP, 2000) articulates the internal relation between logic and the ethical in the Tractatus. In his J.J. Rousseau: An Afterlife of Words (Harvard UP, 2005), Eli Friedlander investigates the problem of exemplarity in philosophy by way of a close reading of Rousseau's autobiographical meditation, Reveries of the Solitary Walker. His recent Walter Benjamin. A Philosophical Portrait (Harvard UP, 2011) draws together Benjamin’s corpus of writings so as to present it as a rigorous configuration of philosophy with an overarching coherence and a deep-seated commitment to engage the philosophical tradition. His more recent writing and research is devoted to Kant's aesthetics as well as to the Kantian legacy in the history of analytic philosophy. Eli Friedlander has also written essays in art criticism and film.Taking time off from teaching, every now and then, he has been working in recent years as a stage designer for opera productions.

The book to which this conference is devoted, Friedlander’s study of Benjamin, is the first systematic philosophical account of Benjamin’s work. It discusses the roots of that work in the thought of, for example, Leibniz, Kant, Goethe, and the Romantic philosophers Fr. Schlegel and Novalis. It demonstrates the interweaving of this philosophical tradition with the theological and messianic component of Benjamin’s thought. It unfolds the philosophical significance of Benjamin’s idiosyncratic use of such crucial notions as “truth,” “meaning,” and “Idea.” It takes seriously Benjamin’s claim regarding the epistemological purport of dreams, demonstrates the role of the “body” in Benjamin’s thought, and reconstructs Benjamin’s complex views on time, history, and memory, views that are foundational to what might be called his historico-philosophical method. Friedlander’s philosophical portrait of Benjamin is just that: a holistic grasp of his individuality rendered in the colors of philosophical reflection. And for this very reason, we feel, its importance reaches beyond the limits of Benjamin studies narrowly conceived.

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For a 3am Magazine Interview with Eli Friedlander - see here. 
Eli Friedlander's Benjamin book has been recently reviewed on Haaretz.com - see here.