Lenn Goodman is Professor of Philosophy and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. His books include Judaism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation (Routledge, 2017), On Justice: An Essay in Jewish Philosophy (Yale University Press, 1991; Littman Library, 2000), God of Abraham (Oxford University Press, 1996, winner of the Gratz Centennial Prize), Judaism, Human Rights and Human Values (Oxford University Press, 1998), In Defense of Truth: A Pluralistic Approach (Humanity Press, 2001), Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself (Gifford Lectures, Oxford University Press, 2008), Coming to Mind: The Soul and its Body (co-authored with D. G. Caramenico, University of Chicago Press, 2013), and Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere (Cambridge University Press, 2014). He edited Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought (Suny Press, 1992) and co-edited Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy (Suny Press, 2002) and Maimonides and his Heritage (Suny Press, 2009). He also translated with commentary, The Book of Theodicy, Saadiah Gaon’s Arabic translation and commentary on the Book of Job. Goodman won the American Philosophical Association Baumgardt Prize for his 1981 book Monotheism. His work in Jewish philosophy is the focus of Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron Hughes’ volume Lenn E. Goodman: Judaism, Humanity, and Nature in the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers (Brill, 2015). Goodman is now at work with his colleague Phillip Lieberman on a new translation from the Arabic and philosophical commentary on Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed. Goodman describes himself as a synthetic philosopher. As a Herzl Fellow he is preparing a new book titled, The Holy One of Israel, seeking to integrate the ideas of immanence and transcendence, universality and chosenness, divine and human action, in a Judaic idea of God. The book is under contract to Oxford University Press. Goodman is frequently called on to keynote conferences, most recently with papers on Judaism and Democracy at Creighton University, on Jewish and Islamic Virtue Ethics at Oxford University, and on Evolution and Emergence at Oxford University’s Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion.
