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Elliot N. Dorff
Summary
Elliot N. Dorff (born 24 June 1943) is an American Conservative rabbi. He is a Visiting Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and Distinguished Professor of Jewish theology at the American Jewish University (formerly the University of Judaism) in California (where he is also rector), author and a bio-ethicist.
Dorff is an expert in the philosophy of Conservative Judaism, bioethics, and acknowledged within the Conservative community as an expert decisor of Jewish law. Dorff was ordained as a rabbi from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1970. He earned his BA and PhD in philosophy from Columbia University in 1971. He has been awarded four honorary doctoral degrees—from the Jewish Theological Seminary, Gratz College, Hebrew Union College, and American Jewish University—and he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Journal of Law and Religion.
Dorff is the chairman of the Rabbinical Assembly's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, and has written many responsa on various aspects of Jewish law and philosophy.
Among other topics, Dorff is interested in Jewish philosophy, especially epistemology. As a philosopher, Dorff asks about the difference between belief and knowledge. Given the philosophical definition that knowledge differs from belief (knowledge is often defined as a justified, true belief), Dorff's works explicitly analyze epistemological questions. His philosophy of religion, as illustrated especially in his book Knowing God: Jewish Journeys to the Unknowable, stems from the analytic tradition in philosophy, with careful attention to the grounds of justified belief. He claims, however, that the Jewish tradition did not base its belief in God primarily on intellectual activity because Judaism is theistic, believing in a personal God: just as we do not come to know people through creating proofs of their existence, so too that has not been the primary way in which Jews have come to know God.
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