Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed is a classic of world philosophy. Written in Arabic and completed around 1190, the work is among the most powerful and influential living texts in Jewish philosophy, a masterwork navigating the straits between religion and science, logic and revelation. The author, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, commonly known as Maimonides or as Rambam, was a Sephardi Jewish philosopher, jurist, and physician. He wrote his Guide in the form of a letter to a disciple. But the perplexity it aimed to cure might strike anyone who sought to square logic, mathematics, and the sciences with biblical and rabbinic traditions. In this new translation by philosopher Lenn E. Goodman and historian Phillip I. Lieberman, Maimonides' warm, conversational voice and clear explanatory language come through as never before in English. Maimonides knew well the challenges facing serious inquirers at the confluence of the two great streams of thought and learning that Arabic writers labeled 'aql and naql, reason and tradition. The aim of the Guide, he wrote, is to probe the mysteries of physics and metaphysics. But mysteries, to Maimonides, were not conundrums to be celebrated for their obscurity. They were problems to be solved. Maimonides' methods and insights resonate throughout the work of later Jewish thinkers, rationalists, and mystics, and in the work of philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Newton. The Guide continues to inspire inquiry, discovery, and vigorous debate among philosophers, theologians, and lay readers today. Goodman and Lieberman's extensive and detailed commentary provides readers with historical context and philosophical enlightenment, giving generous access to the nuances, complexities, and profundities of what is widely agreed to be the most significant textual monument of medieval Jewish thought, a work that still offers a key to those who hope to harmonize religious commitments and scientific understanding.

Moses Maimonides (1138-1204), physician, scientist, astronomer, philosopher, and theologian, emerged as a halakhist through his classic work, Commentary on the Mishnah, in which he sets out to explain to the layman the meaning and the purpose of the Mishnah, while bypassing the often complicated and concentrated discussions of the Gemara. It was Maimonides' wish to popularize the Mishnah and to make it easily accessible to the general reader. He did so by extracting the underlying principles involved in lengthy, often abstract, talmudic discussions and stating the halakhic decisions derived therein, interspersing them with ethical insights and philosophical teachings.

This superb abridgement and annotated translation of Maimonides' monumental work includes discussions of divine language, the scope and limits of human knowledge, cosmological doctrines concerning the creation or eternity of the world, prophecy and providence, the nature and purpose of divine law, and moral and political philosophy.

Great classic of medieval Judaism, major attempt to reconcile revealed religion (Pentateuch, commentaries) and Aristotelian philosophy. Enormously important in all Western thought. Unabridged Friedlander translation. 50-page introduction. "...a great influence on Jewish and Christian scholasticism."-Jewish Civic Press.

This fourth volume of the critical edition of the medical aphorisms compiled by Maimonides (1138-1204) covers treatises sixteen to twenty-one. The central subjects of these treatises include women's diseases, physical exercise, bathing, foods, and the consumption of drugs. Most of the aphorisms featured in this volume are based on the works of Galen, but Maimonides also quotes from other ancient and medieval physicians, including some whose work does not survive in any other source. This edition provides both the Arabic text and an authoritative English translation by Gerrit Bos in parallel-column format.

This monument of rabbinical exegesis, written at the end of the twelfth century, has exerted an immense and continuing influence upon Jewish thought. It has also been a formative element in the thinking of leading Christian writers and philosophers down through the seventeenth century. The Guide is not a philosophical treatise. Rather, its aim is to liberate men from the tormenting perplexities arising from their understanding of the Bible according only to its literal meaning.