ABOUT

 Douglas Yoder has  a B.S. in Engineering Science from Penn State, a B.A. and M.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship, an M.Div. from Fuller Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion and Theology from Claremont Graduate University. He writes, and teaches classical piano in Los Angeles

(see chopin.academy).

This 2007 doctoral dissertation is the first study to systematically examine epistemology in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. Members of the dissertation committee were Marvin Sweeney, Hebrew Bible (Chair); Amy Kind, Analytic Philosophy; and Frederick Sontag, Philosophy of Religion.

This study presents a philosophical reading of the native epistemology of the Tanakh. It seeks to provide a maximally noncontroversial account of this form of conceptuality by treating the Tanakh

not as religious literature, but as an ancient Semitic epistemic text. The frequency of the verb “know” is used to identify textual locations of epistemic emphasis indigenous to the literature,

while analytic philosophy and classical studies are employed to elucidate these passages and set them in transcultural context. Tanakh epistemology is cohesive, nuanced, far-ranging, and bold. Its deepest conceptual commitments voice noncontradictory positions regarding skepticism, perception, physical and nonphysical reality, epistemic limits, and the relation of knowledge to power, desire, and life. The articulation of these positions enables a meta-epistemic assessment of the sometimes variant assumptions of Hellenically-derived philosophical epistemology. Since this form of Greek thought conceptually undergirds the western intellectual tradition, a meta-epistemic engagement of this nature is broadly relevant for western culture. This can be seen in early modernism in the way Spinoza sets off philosophical against biblical epistemology in his attempt to liberate the western mind from ecclesial control. This study argues that neither Christendom nor Spinoza provide accurate accounts of Tanakh epistemology. The prisms by which ancient forms of Greek and Semitic conceptuality are refracted into early modern Europe are therefore flawed, and with them the western bases for assuming that Greek-derived epistemology is of uniquely

transcultural validity. Consequences follow for biblical studies, religion, philosophy, and politics, and for other domains in thought and culture.

 In this 2020 volume from Cambridge University Press, Douglas Yoder uses the tools of modern and postmodern philosophy and biblical criticism to elucidate the epistemology of the Tanakh, the collection of writings that comprise the Hebrew Bible. Despite the conceptual sophistication of the Tanakh, its epistemology has been overlooked in both religious and secular hermeneutics. The concept of revelation, the genre of apocalypse, and critiques of ideology and theory are all found within or derive from epistemic texts of the Tanakh. Yoder examines how philosophers such as Spinoza, Hume, and Kant interacted with such matters. He also explores how the motifs of writing, reading, interpretation, image, and animals, topics that figure prominently in the work of Derrida, Foucault, and Nietzsche, appear also in the Tanakh. An understanding of Tanakh epistemology, he concludes, can lead to new appraisals of religious and secular life throughout the modern world. 

This is a "wide-ranging study of epistemology in the Tanakh ...  A very challenging and rewarding book." Norman S. Wilson, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament.

"Yoder points to something epistemologically distinct in the Bible that has been misconstrued within much of intellectual history." Arthur Jan Keefer, Review of Biblical Literature.