Faith in reason, reason in faith -- The nature of God, the God of nature -- Torah from heaven -- Divine providence -- The oral Torah and rabbinic tradition -- Religion and superstition -- Israel and humanity -- Conversion to Judaism -- Eternal Torah, changing times -- Faith and reason.

Introduction The purpose of this study is to characterize a conception of prayer that plays an important role in the religious thought of the medieval ...

In this paper, I attempt to consider Jewish philosophy in opposition to the anti-ocularcentrism that defined the German Jewish philosophical tradition after Kant, namely the idea that Judaism—or at least its philosophical expression in Maimonidean philosophy—is aniconic and cognitively abstract. I do so by attempting to rethink the epistemic-veridical place of the imagination and visual experience in the Guide of the Perplexed . Once the imagination has been disciplined by reason, is there any cognitive status to an image or sound (...) that the eye or the ear perceives, and to that mental faculty that combines and recombines such impressions? Is the sight or sound of revelation a hallucination or just a mere figure of speech? Does it bear any relation to a spiritual reality external to the human mind and finite physical existence? To address these questions I explore the visual images, both iconic and aniconic-abstract, that distinguish the Guide . There is no getting past the visual imagination, although I am not sure Maimonides would have recognized it as such. Even when he leaves behind figurative visual cues such as the false image-work of the undisciplined imagination or the appearance of angels and images of God found in lower grades of prophecy, he turns to another visual register, namely the “abstract art“ of pure, dazzling light. In regard to these questions, Maimonides was more Greek than German, ascribing, cautiously, penultimate cognitive status to the visual imagination. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to consider Jewish philosophy in opposition to the anti-ocularcentrism that defined the German Jewish philosophical tradition after Kant, namely the idea that Judaism—or at least its philosophical expression in Maimonidean philosophy—is aniconic and cognitively abstract. I do so by attempting to rethink the epistemic-veridical place of the imagination and visual experience in the Guide of the Perplexed . Once the imagination has been disciplined by reason, is there any cognitive status to an image or sound (...) that the eye or the ear perceives, and to that mental faculty that combines and recombines such impressions? Is the sight or sound of revelation a hallucination or just a mere figure of speech? Does it bear any relation to a spiritual reality external to the human mind and finite physical existence? To address these questions I explore the visual images, both iconic and aniconic-abstract, that distinguish the Guide . There is no getting past the visual imagination, although I am not sure Maimonides would have recognized it as such. Even when he leaves behind figurative visual cues such as the false image-work of the undisciplined imagination or the appearance of angels and images of God found in lower grades of prophecy, he turns to another visual register, namely the “abstract art“ of pure, dazzling light. In regard to these questions, Maimonides was more Greek than German, ascribing, cautiously, penultimate cognitive status to the visual imagination. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to consider Jewish philosophy in opposition to the anti-ocularcentrism that defined the German Jewish philosophical tradition after Kant, namely the idea that Judaism—or at least its philosophical expression in Maimonidean philosophy—is aniconic and cognitively abstract. I do so by attempting to rethink the epistemic-veridical place of the imagination and visual experience in the Guide of the Perplexed . Once the imagination has been disciplined by reason, is there any cognitive status to an image or sound (...) that the eye or the ear perceives, and to that mental faculty that combines and recombines such impressions? Is the sight or sound of revelation a hallucination or just a mere figure of speech? Does it bear any relation to a spiritual reality external to the human mind and finite physical existence? To address these questions I explore the visual images, both iconic and aniconic-abstract, that distinguish the Guide . There is no getting past the visual imagination, although I am not sure Maimonides would have recognized it as such. Even when he leaves behind figurative visual cues such as the false image-work of the undisciplined imagination or the appearance of angels and images of God found in lower grades of prophecy, he turns to another visual register, namely the “abstract art“ of pure, dazzling light. In regard to these questions, Maimonides was more Greek than German, ascribing, cautiously, penultimate cognitive status to the visual imagination. (shrink)

Almut Sh. Bruckstein provides the first English translation and her own extensive commentary on this landmark 1908 work, which inspired readings of medieval and ...

Moses Maimonides, rabbinist, philosopher, and physician, had a greater impact on Jewish history than any other medieval figure. Born in Cordova, Spain, in 1137 or 1138, he spent a few years in Morocco, visited Palestine, and settled in Egypt by 1167. He died there in 1204. Maimonides was a man of superlatives. He wrote the first commentary to cover the entire Mishna corpus; composed what quickly became the dominant work on the 613 commandments believed to have been given by God (...) to Moses; produced the most comprehensive and most intensely studied code of rabbinic law to emerge from the Middle Ages; and his Guide for the Perplexed has had a greater influence on Jewish thought than any other Jewish philosophic work. During the last decades of his life, he conducted an active medical practice, which extended into the royal court--the Sultan Saladin is reported to have been his patient--and composed some ten or eleven works on medicine. This book offers a fresh look at every aspect of Maimonides' life and works: the course of his life, his education, his personality, and his rabbinic, philosophical, and medical writings. At a number of junctures, Davidson points out that information about Maimonides which has been accepted for decades or centuries as common knowledge is in actuality supported by no credible evidence and often, more disconcertingly, is patently incorrect. Maimonides' diverse writings are frequently viewed as expressions of several distinct personas, uncomfortably and awkwardly bundled into a single human frame; the present book treats his writings as expressions of a single, integrated, albeit complex, mind. (shrink)

Interpreting Maimonides in his multiple contexts -- A dialectical topic: creation -- Necessity and the law -- Religious language (A): Negative theology and divine perfections -- Religious language (B): Perfections and simplicity -- Religious language (C): God's knowledge as a divine perfection -- Secrets of the Torah: Ezekiel's vision of the chariot -- The scope and accuracy of Ezekiel's prophecy -- A kind of conclusion.

While Maimonides reread his sources to reconcile biblical and rabbinic texts with the demands of reason, Hermann Cohen, in his construction of a “religion of reason,” rereads Maimonides' rereadings of those very same texts. Maimonides' Judaism often bridges the sources toward Cohen's religion of reason by providing a philological anchor that nudges a term or verse now viewed through a more modern historical and evolutionary lens toward its ultimate reason-infused meaning. This paper will explore a hitherto neglected feature of their (...) oeuvres that unites Maimonides and Cohen as much as it distinguishes them: the “Jewishness” shared by both, as evident in the most Jewish of all exercises that suffuses both their works, biblical and midrashic exegesis. Their exegetical nets are systematically cast widely throughout the breadth of the Hebrew Bible, but more often than not they offer highly discrepant readings of the same passage or prooftext. Cohen's referencing of many of the same sources appeals to their Maimonidean rationalist refurbishment, but at the same time often places them in combative discourse in order to subvert and reorient Maimonides' exegesis. The notions of divine names, the “image” ( tselem ) of God, “nearness” to God, and divine “glory” ( kavod ) are closely examined to demonstrate this intertextual relationship between these two seminal Jewish thinkers. While Cohen may be misreading Maimonides' rereading of scripture, he remains a true hermeneutical disciple in his exegetical restructuring and realignment of scripture. Cohen's programmatic exegetical idealization of Maimonidean prooftexts to reconstruct a new Kantianized God forms a common ground of discourse with Maimonides that traverses seven centuries of a quintessential Jewish enterprise. (shrink)

This paper explores Hermann Cohen's engagement with, and appropriation of, Maimonides to refute the common assumption that Cohen's endeavor was to harmonize Judaism with Western culture. Exploring the changes of Cohen's conception of humility from Ethik des reinen Willens to the Ethics of Maimonides and Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism , this paper highlights the centrality of the collective Jewish mission to bear witness against the dominant order of Western civilization and philosophy in Cohen's Jewish thought.

After an initially sympathetic reading of Maimonides, Levinas develops an ambivalent attitude toward the Great Eagle, whom he views as a champion of intellectualist Judaism. Nevertheless, insights from the early engagement with Maimonides are carried forth into the central claims of Totality and Infinity regarding freedom, creation, particularity and transcendence. Levinas' arguments are directed at Heidegger but can also be seen as a phenomenological repetition of the medieval dispute about the eternity of the world. Later, Levinas continues this engagement with (...) Maimonides by transforming the latter's negative theology into what I call ethical negative theology. (shrink)

Faur's interpretation of this text reveals Maimonides's views on prophecy and philosophy, on imagination and intellect, on providence, on the importance of ...

Maimon once described the philosophical project underlying his Essay on Transcendental Philosophy as an attempt “to unify Kantian philosophy with Spinozism ”. But in the only reference to Spinoza in the Essay , he stresses that Spinoza was not the source of his argument. In this paper I will argue that, notwithstanding the disclaimer, Maimon's solution for the problems that in his view haunted Kant's theory of knowledge was indeed significantly influenced by Spinoza, as well as by the medieval Jewish (...) Aristotelian Maimonides. Since the key concept in the solution proposed by Maimon is the metaphysical doctrine of the “infinite intellect”, my focus will be on clarifying how this doctrine is related to Maimonides' doctrine of the divine intellect and to Spinoza's doctrine of Deus sive Natura . My main contention is that important aspects of Maimon's doctrine of the “infinite intellect” are based on a Spinozistic interpretation of Maimonides' doctrine of the divine intellect. (shrink)

: In this paper I explain how Spinoza's ontological monism is related to the monotheism of a distinct tradition in medieval Aristotelianism exemplified by Maimonides. My main contention is that Maimonides' God, conceived as intellectual activity has the same structure as Spinoza's Deus sive Natura. The main difference between them is that Maimonides' God is confined to cognitive activity, whereas Spinoza's God is extensive activity as well. I trace the impact of the medieval doctrine of God on Spinoza's thought from (...) the Cogitata Metaphysica to the Ethics, establishing conceptual parallels, literary links, and an explanation of the steps leading from the former to the latter. (shrink)

Maimonides’ moral psychology undergoes development, which this essay attempts to detail. In the early Shemonah Peraqim (Eight Chapters) Maimonides charts out a seemingly anti-Aristotelian view that underscores the specificity of each part of the human soul and the utter distinctiveness of the human species. Human beings share nothing with non-human animals, prima facie not even the most “animalistic” features. Over time, however, a change in Maimonides’ position is to be noted. In his philosophical magnum opus, the Guide of the Perplexed, (...) Maimonides adopts a more Aristotelian position, understanding human beings as sharing with nonhumananimals certain sub-rational faculties, but differing from them in their ratiocinative capacities. As in Aristotle, human beings turn out to be essentially rational animals. (shrink)

Spinoza resolves the tension between reason and revelation by granting reason complete authority and autonomy in all philosophical and natural matters, and by denying revelation any claims to knowledge. Despite this dramatic partisanship, he attempts to make this solution attractive to believers by creating a hermeneutic that allows a limited claim to knowledge for revelation. This article attempts to explain how he arrived at this strategy and why he believed it would succeed.

Within The Guide of the Perplexed Maimonides presents an argument that is intended to render probable the temporal creation of the cosmos. In one of these arguments Maimonides adopts the Kalamic strategy of arguing for the necessity of there being a “particularizing” agent. Maimonides argues that even one who grants Aristotelian science can still ask why the heavenly realm is as it is, to which there is no reply forthcoming but “God so willed it.” The argument is effective against the (...) Arabic Neoplatonic Aristotelians, but not against Aristotle himself. Aristotle’s response to Maimonides would be that the latter is in effect asking, “Why are there the essences there are?”, a question that Aristotle would take to be fundamentally misplaced, since he holds that the existence of the theoretical primitives of every science is to be assumed. Nevertheless, Maimonides’ challenge has force for those who recognize a demand for a metaphysical explanation for there being those kinds of things posited as primitive by the natural sciences. (shrink)

In this original study, noted scholar and theologian David Hartman discusses the relation between Maimonides' halakhic writings and The Guide of the Perplexed- ...

This paper examines Hermann Cohen's idiosyncratic construction of a medieval Jewish philosophical tradition, focusing primarily, though not exclusively, on his Charakteristik der Ethik Maimunis . This construction, not unlike modern accounts, is filtered through the central place of Maimonides. For Cohen, however, Maimonides' centrality is defined not by his systematization of Aristotelianism, but by his elevation of ethics over metaphysics. The ethical and pantheistic concerns of Maimonides' precursors, according to this reading, anticipate his uniqueness. Whereas Shlomo ibn Gabirol's pantheistic doctrine (...) of emanation, for example, assigned little weight to ethics, Abraham ibn Daud rebelled against such a doctrine. Ibn Daud—much like Bahya ibn Paquda and Abraham ibn Ezra—becomes part of a Jewish philosophical tradition that culminates in Maimonides' rejection of Aristotelian metaphysics. In particular, this paper examines the way in which Cohen envisaged the pre-Maimonidean philosophical tradition, putting his highly critical reading of Shlomo ibn Gabirol and his pantheistic obsession with prime matter in counterpoint with his more favorable readings of Abraham ibn Daud and Bahya ibn Paquda. (shrink)

A study of the ways Maimonides and Aquinas both borrow from Aristotle and depart from him, in regard to the issue of forgiveness. The paper explicates moral-psychological issues and normative issues, connecting them to the perfectionism of the philosophical anthropology shared by the three thinkers. The theistic commitments of Maimonides and Aquinas ground important departures from Aristotle regarding the possibility of moral change and regarding moral relations between persons.

Maimonides uses Aristotelian philosophical idiom to articulate his moral philosophy, but there are fundamental differences between his and Aristotle’s conceptions of moral psychology and the nature of the moral agent. The Maimonidean conception of volition and its role in repentance and ethical self-correction are quite un-Aristotelian. The relation between this capacity to alter one’s character and the accessibility of ethical requirements given in the Law is explored. This relation helps explain why for Maimonides practical wisdom is not recognized as a (...) virtue, and why ethical perfection (a requirement for human perfection) is achievable even by those long-established in ethically unsound dispositions. The power of will to “restore the soul” (by following the prescriptions of the Law) when character is disordered is a significant departure from Aristotelian philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

Many of the basic elements of Maimonides' moral psychology are Aristotelian, but there are some important respects in which Maimonides departs from Aristotle. One of those respect concerns the possibility of changing one's character. There is, according to Maimonides, redemptive possibility that Aristotle does not recognize. There is, according to Maimonides, a redemptive possibility that Aristotle does not recognize. This is based on the fact of revealed law. That is, if there is revealed law, then there is guidance for the (...) ordering of one's dispositions to what is good, even though the individual lacks practical wisdom. There is, in the Maimonidean account, both allowance for more plasticity of character, and at the same time a heightened responsibility for acknowledging what is ethically required. (shrink)

Jon Jacobs emphasises their distinctive contributions, emphasises the shared rational emphasis of their approach to Torah, and draws out resonances with ...

Maimonides’ attitude to animals in his ethical teachings is not the same in all his works. His cosmological outlook changed over the years, as shown in the justification he gives for the existence of animals. In a youthful work he presents a teleological, anthropocentric viewpoint, according to which animals are merely a means to an end and were created solely to serve man. However, in The Guide of the Perplexed, written in his old age, he argues that every creature was (...) created for its own sake, since existence is good in itself. Another difference is the expansion of his rationalistic approach to the precepts of the Torah. Only in his late works does he argue that every divine command can be explained. As a consequence, one finds in The Guide of the Perplexed ethical explanations of precepts concerning animals, as well as the argument that there is sometimes no difference between the suffering of animals and human beings. In his earlier works, however, he had stated that such precepts were entirely arbitrary. (shrink)

Husik, I. An anonymous medieval Christian critic of Maimonides.--Neuburger, C. Das Wesen des Gesetzes in der Philosophie des Maimonides.--Neubauer, J. Zum ursprünglichen Titel von Maimunis Buch der Gebote und seiner Geschichte.--Teicher, J. Studi su Maimonide.--Wolfson, H. Maimonides and Halevi.--Diesendruck, Z. Die Telelogie bei Maimonides.--Heinemann, I. Maimuni und die arabischen Einheitslehrer.--Strauss, L. Quelques remarques sur la science politique de Maimonide et de Fârâbî.--Teicher, J. Observations critiques sur l'interprétation traditionelle de la doctrine des attributs négatifs chez Maimonide.--Altmann, A. Das Verhältnis Maimunis zur (...) jüdischen Mystik.--Shmiedl, A. Die Auferstehungslehre in der jüdischen Religionsphilosophie des Mittelalters.--Rawidowicz, S. Knowledge of God.--Strauss, L. Der Ort der Vorsehungslehre nach der Ansight Maimunis.--Strauss, L. Maimunis Lehre von der Prophetie und ihre Quellen. (shrink)

Maimonides is regularly thought to have seen the ideal human as nothing more than a rational animal. In this essay I show that this picture of Maimonides is insufficiently nuanced and reflects a notion of intellectualism thinner and more pallid than that actually held by him. But first I adduce evidence for the standard view from Maimonides’ positions on perfected and imperfected human beings, and from his discussions of immortality, morality, providence, prophecy, and the distinction between humans and animals. Maimonides’ (...) universalism and his messianic vision are also shown to reflect his intellectualism. In the second half of the essay I argue that Maimonides holds that knowledge is transformative. Through an analysis of his discussions of human perfection, prophecy, and love of God, it is shown that learning carried out properly transforms the learner into a new kind of person. (shrink)

Providence and the rabbinic tradition -- Mosaic prophecy: Maimonides and Gersonides -- Eschatology and miracles -- Creation, miracles, revelation -- Song of Songs and Gersonides' world -- Maimonides and Gersonides on astronomy and metaphysics -- Gersonides on the Song of Songs and the nature of science -- Politics and perfection: Gersonides vs. Maimonides -- The role of the active intellect in human cognition -- Imitatio dei and the dissemination of scientific knowledge -- Moses ibn Tibbon and Gersonides on Song of (...) Songs -- Misogyny: Gersonides vs. Maimonides -- Gersonides and his cultured despisers: Arama and Abravanel. (shrink)

This study charts the development of creed formulation in Judaism from its inception with Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) to the beginning of the 16th century, when systematic attention to the problem disappeared from the agenda of Jewish intellectuals. Kellner describes, analyzes, and compares the dogmatic systems of Maimonides, Duran, Crescas, Albo, Bibago, Abravanel, and many others, and provides English translations of several previously unexamined or untranslated texts.

The most important Jewish source for Hermann Cohen's rational theology of Judaism is Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed . Indeed, the Guide is of such importance that Cohen bases his entire idealistic interpretation of the Jewish religion on it. In particular, Cohen derives his discussion of the continued authority of Mosaic law from the Guide . What follows focuses on Cohen's discussion of the “Law” in his Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism , and attempts to fill (...) a gap in recent Cohen research by dealing with questions of halakhah and the interpretation of rabbinical sources. Cohen's original reading of, inter alia, Guide III.31-32 led him to formulate a theory wherein Mosaic law—and by extension Judaism—guarantees the highest end of human morality. In identifying God with this end, Cohen eventually finds the ultimate criterion for the decision of how much of traditional Jewish law must still be observed in the need for the preservation of the purest monotheism—another central point in Maimonides' philosophy. (shrink)