Yirmiyahu Yovel (20 October 1935, Haifa – 10 June 2018) was an Israeli philosopher and public intellectual. He was Professor Emeritus of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the New School for Social Research in New York. Yovel had also been a political columnist in Israel, cultural and political critic and a frequent presence in the media. Yovel was a laureate of the Israel Prize in philosophy and officier of the French order of the Palme académique. His books were translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Hebrew, Korean and Japanese. Yovel was married to Shoshana Yovel, novelist and community organizer, and they had a son, Jonathan Yovel, poet and law professor, and a daughter, Ronny, classical musician, TV host and family therapist.
Biography
Education and early philosophical development
Born in Haifa, Palestine, then under a British mandate, Yirmiyahu Yovel graduated in 1953 from the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa. Following his mandatory military service he studied philosophy and economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, completing his B.A. in 1961 and M.A. in 1964. He supported his studies as radio news editor and presenter. However, he declined a permanent career in broadcasting and went to the Sorbonne and Princeton University to complete his philosophical studies. In 1968 he earned his PhD from the Hebrew University. His adviser was Nathan Rothenstreich.
Yovel came to the university driven by existential philosophical concerns and suspicious of rationalism. Upholding individual subjectivity, young Yovel was estranged from the collectivist ideals and political ideologies of the time (including the socialist-Zionist ethos), because of their demand to monopolize and politicize all intellectual concerns. Religion, too, was not the answer, but rather an escape. Yovel has shared from the start Nietzsche's radical drive to existential lucidity, which can be emotionally taxing but also liberating.
It was, in particular, Kant's program of critical reason (though not its actual execution), and the concept of finite rationality that provided Yovel with the terms for a constructive critique of rationalism, one that recognizes rationality as indispensable for human life and culture, even while taking its finitude more radically than Kant's, by admitting its fallibility, open-endedness, and non-absolute nature.
Yovel holds that the history of philosophy is embedded in most philosophical discourse, and that often it contains issues and insights that can be fruitfully contemporized by a method of immanent reconstruction. His own philosophical position can be described as "a philosophy of immanence," which, following Spinoza, views the immanent world as all there is and as the sole possible source of social and political normativity. The latter theme was extensively probed in his two-volume Spinoza and Other Heretics (Princeton, 1989), which traces the idea of immanence back to Spinoza and follows its adventures in later thinkers of modernity from Kant and Hegel to Nietzsche and beyond.
Yovel was to return as visiting professor both to Princeton University (1970–71) and the Sorbonne (1978–80), among other foreign appointments. His years on both sides of the Atlantic helped shape Yovel's attitude towards Anglo-American analytic philosophy. He shares its demand for clarity and precision – this was recognized as a hallmark of his writing – but criticized its often scholastic tendencies and a-historical approach.
Following his academic and public activity Yirmiyahu Yovel became a prominent voice in Israeli intellectual life. His numerous columns in major papers, mostly Ha'aretz and Yediot Aharonot, probed public attitudes and government policies. He was an early advocate of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, and strongly opposed the settlement activity in the West Bank and Gaza as politically wrong and motivated by false Messianism.