Joseph Agassi

Joseph Agassi was born in 1927 in Jerusalem

Joseph Agassi was born Joseph Birnbaum in 1927 to a Haredi family that lived in the Bukharan neighborhood of Jerusalem. He studied at a Haredi heder, at the Tachkemoni school and later at the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva. He left religious life in his youth.

From 1946 to 1951 he studied physics, mathematics and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and he received a master's degree in physics in 1952. He then wrote his doctorate under Karl Popper at the London School of Economics and completed it in 1956. During his studies he met Judith Buber, a granddaughter of Martin Buber, and married her in 1949.

He taught philosophy at the University of Hong Kong from 1960 to 1963. From 1971 to 1996 he was a full professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University, while also teaching at Boston University and York University in Toronto. His work dealt with the rationality of science, metaphysics, democratic politics and the philosophy of technology.

He criticized the settler movement and argued that Israel should see its nation as separate from the Jewish people. In 2008 he joined a petition asking to record nationality as Israeli rather than Jewish, which the courts rejected. He lived in Herzliya and died in January 2023.