Paula Schwebel

Paula Schwebel is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Toronto, where she is also a graduate student instructor and teaching assistant. Her research interests include Kant and German Idealism, the Frankfurt School, and modern Jewish philosophy.

My dissertation explores how theological and political discourses were embedded in discussions of the infinitesimal in late imperial Germany and the early Weimar Republic. I focus particularly on the work of Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin. Although the concept of the infinitesimal is of mathematical origin, its importance for these Jewish philosophers is in developing an alternative to the Hegelian project of attaining Absolute knowledge. What has been dismissed by systematic thought as a negligible quantity becomes the object of philosophical interest after the collapse of the Hegelian system. My work is particularly concerned with the ethical, political, and theological implications of the turn towards thinking the infinitesimal. In conjunction with the summer school program, I investigate how philosophical interest in the infinitesimal stems from the Jewish Bilderverbot.