While Jewish thought is a pursuit of the mind which grows organically from and alongside rabbinic modes of thought, where the ways of thinking are uniquely Jewish as well as the subjects thought about, Jewish philosophy retains the subjects but exposes them to the intellectual tradition that began in Plato’s academy. This tradition is oriented by what Plato called ideas. Accordingly, Jewish philosophy is the attempt to form ideas about Judaism, about primary themes in Judaism such as monotheism, revelation, cosmogenesis, providence, faith, theodicy, ethics, law, humanism, etc.. Various ideas of Judaism will be taken up in this course from the writings of Philo of Alexandria, R. Moses Maimonides, Yehuda Halevi, Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, R. Yosef B. Soloveitchik, etc..