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The Founding College of the University of Toronto
Headshot of Robert Gibbs

Robert Gibbs

Faculty
Professor, Department of Philosophy (Acting Vice-Principal)
416-978-7415
Website
UC 320
Campus: St. George

His current research focuses on Higher Education, and he has recently completed a book-length manuscript, The University in Question: Ideas in Dialogue, under contract at UBC Press.  In it, he inquires what a Research University is for and explores different models of universities by refocusing on the research capacities of students.

A new project is beginning on Study and Dialogue, focusing on the collaboration or Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig to translate the Hebrew Scriptures into German.  This will involve studying an archive of 5,000 manuscripts that have not been explored and assembling an international team of Faculty and Students to work on the materials. The initial phase is SSHRC funded, and after COVID delays, the project began during the 2021-22 academic year. 

  • BA, Yale University
  • MA, University of Toronto
  • PhD, University of Toronto
  • Jewish thought
  • Phenomenological tradition
  • German idealism
  • Higher Education
  • Philosophy of Law
  • French postmodern literary theory
  • Social theory
  • Existentialism
  • Pragmatism

Books:

  • Why Ethics? Signs of Responsibilities, (Princeton: Princeton University Press) 2000. 400 pp.
  • Reasoning After Revelation: Postmodern Jewish Philosophy,  co-authored with Steven Kepnes and Peter Ochs. (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press) 1998. 161pp.
  •  Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas, (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1992 (Paperback, 1994) 281 pp.
  •  Suffering Religion, co-edited with Elliot R. Wolfson, London: Routledge, 2002.

Articles:

  • “Grammar of the Laws” in The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political Theology and Law, ed. Leonard Kaplan Rudy Koshar, Lanham, MA: Lexington Books, 2012, 371-392.
  • “The Name of God in Levinas’ Philosophy” Saintly Influence: Edith Wyschogrod and the Possibilities of Philosophy of Religion, ed. Eric Boynton and Martin Kafka, Fordham University Press, 2010, 97-112.
  • “Eternity in History: Rolling the Scroll” Liturgy, Time and the Politics of Redemption, ed. R. Rashkover and C. Pecknold,  Eerdmans, 2006, 127-140.
  • “Jurisprudence is the Organon of Ethics: Kant and Cohen on Ethics, Law, and Religion” Hermann Cohen’s Critical Idealism, ed. Reinier Munk, Springer, 2005, 193-230.
  • “Messianic Epistemology: Thesis XV” Walter Benjamin and History, ed. Andrew Benjamin, Continuum Press, 2005, 197-214.
  • “Hermann Cohen’s Messianism: The History of the Future”  ‘Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism’ Tradition and the Concept of Origin in Hermann Cohen’s Later Work, ed. Helmut Holzhey, Gabriel Motzkin, and Hartwig Wiedebach, Hildesheim: Olms, 2000, 331-349.
  • “Jewish Dimensions of Radical Ethics” Ethics as First Philosophy, Routledge, 1995, 13-24.
  • “Of Time and Pages” College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 42.2 (Spring 2015) 239-277.
  • “Après vous: Theory and Asymmetry” for The Modern Schoolman vol LXXXIV, 2-3 (jan-mar 2007): 217-34
  • “Verdict and Sentence: Cover and Levinas on the Robe of Justice” in Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Vol. 14, No. 1-2 (2006) . 73-90.
  • “Law and Ethics” in Revista Portguesa de Filosofia  Vol.26, No. 2-4 (April-Dec 2006), 395-407.
  • “Seeing the Unique God: Humor and the Sublime in Jewish Aesthetics,” Archivio Di Filosofia, Vol LXXI, N. 1-3 (2003), 219-32.
  • “Asymmetry and Mutuality:  Habermas , Levinas and Mead” for Philosophy and Social Criticism,  (1997, #2) 51-6