Maimonides was not the first rabbinic scholar to take an interest in philosophy, but he was unique in being a towering figure in both areas. His law code, the Mishneh torah, stands with Rashi's commentary on the Babylonian Talmud as one of the two most intensely studied rabbinic works coming out of the Middle Ages, while his Guide of the Perplexed is the most influential and widely read Jewish philosophical work ever written. Admirers and critics have arrived at wildly divergent perceptions of the man. We have Maimonides the atheist or agnostic, Maimonides the sceptic, Maimonides the deist, Maimonides the Aristotelian, the Averroist, or proto-Kantian. We have a Maimonides seduced by the blandishments of 'accursed philosophy'; a Maimonides who sowed the seeds that led to Spanish Jews' loss of faith and mass apostasy and who was therefore responsible for the demise of Spanish Jewry; a Maimonides who incorporated philosophical elements into his rabbinic works and wrote the Guide of the Perplexed not to propagate doctrines to which he was personally committed but in order to rescue errant souls seduced by philosophy; a Maimonides who was the defender of the faith and defined the articles of Jewish belief for all time. In his own estimation, Maimonides was neither exclusively a dedicated philosopher nor exclusively a devoted rabbinist: he saw philosophy and the Written and Oral Torahs as a single, harmonious domain, and he believed that this view was similarly fundamental to the lives of the prophets and rabbis of old. In this book, Herbert Davidson examines Maimonides' efforts to reconstitute this all-embracing, rationalist worldview that he felt had been lost during the millennium-long exile.

A study of problems revolving around the subject of intellect in the philosophies of Alfarabi (d. 950), Avicenna (980-1037), and Averroes (1126-1198), this book pays particular attention to the way in which these philosophers addressed the tangle of issues that grew up around the active intellect. Davidson starts by reviewing discussions in Greek and early Arabic philosophy that served as the background for the three Arabic thinkers. He examines the cosmologies and theories of human and active intellect of the three philosophers and covers such subjects as the emanation of the supernal realm from the First Cause, the emanation of the lower world from the transcendent active intellect, stages of human intellect, illumination of the human intellect by the transcendent active intellect, conjunction of the human intellect with the transcendent active intellect, prophecy, and human immortality. Davidson traces the impact of the three philosophers on medieval Jewish philosophy and Latin Scholasticism. He shows that the later medieval Jewish philosophers and the Scholastics had differing perceptions of Averroes because they happened to use works belonging to different periods of his philosophic career. This book will be of interest to the student and scholar in medieval philosophy, the history of philosophy, and medieval culture.

In this classic study, Herbert A. Davidson examines every medieval Arabic and Hebrew proof for the eternity of the world, the creation of the world and the existence of God which has philosophical character, disregarding only those that rest entirely on religious faith or fall below a minimum threshold of plausibility. Classifying the proofs systematically, he analyses and explains them, and traces their sources in Greek philosophy. He pursues the penetration of some of these Islamic and Jewish arguments into medieval Christian philosophy and, in a few instances, all the way into seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European philosophy. Unique in both its classification of the proofs and its comprehensiveness, this work will once again serve medievalists, historians of philosophy and historians of ideas.