Reviews for The tao and the daimon

The average rating for The tao and the daimon based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-12-03 00:00:00 Bilal Sahi There is much to make of this work. It is an ethical treatise, a document, a manual for the tenets of three religions that can not see eye to eye. Rosenzweig attempts to reconcile the common traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with the base foundation of ethical analysis. The syntax is puzzling and geared for academics, but the purpose is crystal clear. It is a gem among volumes of works that gloss over or completely ignore the glaring truth- that the basis of our belief begins with a very simple philosophical question.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-07-29 00:00:00 Julio Piazza Several times over the last 45 years I have tried to read this book. I've never gotten more than a third of the way through it. I tried again this week, hoping that my greater experience and maturity would now grant me success. It was not to be. I now conclude that the problem is not me; it's the book. Much of it sounds like a parody of academic philosophical gobbledygook. Consider a few passages plucked at random from this "classic" book: "Yea is the beginning. Nay cannot be the beginning for it could only be a Nay of the Nought. This, however, would presuppose a negatable Nought, a Nay, therefore, that had already decided on a Yea." "Initially this return route thus leads from 'B=B' to 'B=A,' for this, not 'A=B,' is the world-formula rationally attainable from B=B. Since 'B=B' mean the self, B=A means that the particular defines itself more narrowly by means of an overlapping universal." "We found the three points to be individual, mutually unconnected, and could bring them together only arbitrarily, only subject to change, only under the sign of the Perhaps. This very manner of finding them already determined the impossibility of formulating the trajectory which we are looking for here." Ars longa, vita brevis. This game isn't worth the candle. Read a different book.