Jesus and Philosophy

What, if anything, does Jesus of Nazareth have to do with philosophy? This question motivates this collection of essays from leading theologians, philosophers, and biblical scholars. Part I portrays Jesus in his first-century intellectual and historical context, attending to intellectual influences and contributions and contemporaneous similar patterns of thought. Part II examines how Jesus influenced two of the most prominent medieval philosophers. It considers the seeming conceptual shift from Hebraic categories of thought to distinctively Greco-Roman ones in later Christian philosophers. Part III considers the significance of Jesus for some prominent contemporary philosophical topics, including epistemology and the meaning of life. The focus is not so much on how ‘Christianity’ figures in such topics as on how Jesus makes distinctive contributions to them.

Author Biography

Paul K. Moser is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He is author most recently of The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and co-editor of Divine Hiddenness (Cambridge University Press, 2001). He is also editor of the Oxford Handbook of Epistemology (2005), general editor of the book series Oxford Handbooks of Philosophy, and editor of the journal American Philosophical Quarterly.