Henry M . Rosenthal
Hunter College of CUNY, Philosophy, Emeritus
Henry M Rosenthal was the author of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way, edited and with an Introduction by Abigail L. Rosenthal (Temple University Press, 1989). He contributed the introductions to Plato and Berkeley in Foundations of Western Thought (Knopf, 1962). Of his dissertation, On the Function of Religion in Culture (Review of Religion, 1941) his advisor Horace Friess wrote in a Forward, “One has to go back to Emile Durkheim’s work to find comparable reflections on the basic relations of religion and society.”
He graduated from Jewish Theological Seminary with ordination in 1929 and served as rabbi during the War years, when he and his wife worked to rescue ten families from the Holocaust, surmounting the State Department’s formidable paper barriers. In 1945, he became Extension Lecturer at Cooper Union and then a Guggenheim Fellow. He joined the Philosophy Department at Hunter College of The City University of New York in 1948, retiring as Professor Emeritus in 1973.
"Henry M Rosenthal", wrote the theologian Thomas Altizer, "was the philosophical and theological center of a brilliant group of young New York intellectuals, including Meyer Schapiro and Lionel Trilling, and while he was the only believing and practicing Jew within this group, in their early days he commanded their moral center of gravity.” Clifton Fadiman, a classmate in Columbia University’s celebrated class of 1925, said at his Memorial, “I thought Henry was a kind of genius.” Fadiman explained this in terms of “intensity, adherence to a code of feeling which was higher than the rest of us adhered to, and a constant satiric sense. … He seemed to be able, at that very early age, to detect in anyone dishonesty or disloyalty to truth … . He stood out stoutly for a kind of extremism — sometimes in speech, sometimes in conduct, which the rest of us did not have the guts or the nerve to stand out for.” From a very different quarter, Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionism, wrote this about Rosenthal: “he is one of the very few extraordinary men that have walked into my life,” describing one of HMR’s short stories as “a very remarkable account of his inner struggles not only with the God idea but with God. I became aware that Rosenthal is not only a man of unusual literary gifts but of extraordinary spiritual insight and courage.” (Communings of the Spirit: The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, Vol. I, ed. Mel Scult.)
Posted here are essays, reviews and imaginative works.
Henry M Rosenthal was the author of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way, edited and with an Introduction by Abigail L. Rosenthal (Temple University Press, 1989). He contributed the introductions to Plato and Berkeley in Foundations of Western Thought (Knopf, 1962). Of his dissertation, On the Function of Religion in Culture (Review of Religion, 1941) his advisor Horace Friess wrote in a Forward, “One has to go back to Emile Durkheim’s work to find comparable reflections on the basic relations of religion and society.”
He graduated from Jewish Theological Seminary with ordination in 1929 and served as rabbi during the War years, when he and his wife worked to rescue ten families from the Holocaust, surmounting the State Department’s formidable paper barriers. In 1945, he became Extension Lecturer at Cooper Union and then a Guggenheim Fellow. He joined the Philosophy Department at Hunter College of The City University of New York in 1948, retiring as Professor Emeritus in 1973.
"Henry M Rosenthal", wrote the theologian Thomas Altizer, "was the philosophical and theological center of a brilliant group of young New York intellectuals, including Meyer Schapiro and Lionel Trilling, and while he was the only believing and practicing Jew within this group, in their early days he commanded their moral center of gravity.” Clifton Fadiman, a classmate in Columbia University’s celebrated class of 1925, said at his Memorial, “I thought Henry was a kind of genius.” Fadiman explained this in terms of “intensity, adherence to a code of feeling which was higher than the rest of us adhered to, and a constant satiric sense. … He seemed to be able, at that very early age, to detect in anyone dishonesty or disloyalty to truth … . He stood out stoutly for a kind of extremism — sometimes in speech, sometimes in conduct, which the rest of us did not have the guts or the nerve to stand out for.” From a very different quarter, Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionism, wrote this about Rosenthal: “he is one of the very few extraordinary men that have walked into my life,” describing one of HMR’s short stories as “a very remarkable account of his inner struggles not only with the God idea but with God. I became aware that Rosenthal is not only a man of unusual literary gifts but of extraordinary spiritual insight and courage.” (Communings of the Spirit: The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, Vol. I, ed. Mel Scult.)
Posted here are essays, reviews and imaginative works.
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Book Reviews by Henry M . Rosenthal
Reviewed by Henry M. Rosenthal. Accepted but not published by "The Journal of the History of Philosophy".
Books by Henry M . Rosenthal
Reviewed by Henry M. Rosenthal. Accepted but not published by "The Journal of the History of Philosophy".