Abstract
Standing in the gap between the Arabic philosophers of Muslim Spain and the Christian theologians of the West, the Jewish philosophers were instrumental in the transmission of Aristotelian and Arabic philosophy to medieval Europe. These Jewish thinkers were themselves to exercise considerable influence upon Christian scholasticism, so their formulations of the cosmological argument deserve our attention.1 Spawned within Islamic culture, Jewish philosophy was to a considerable extent dependent upon Arabic philosophical thought.2 Often writing in Arabic rather than their native tongue, Jewish philosophers tended to adopt the Arabic treatment of philosophical issues. The peculiar feature of medieval Jewish philosophy is that it preoccupied itself with specifically religious issues; accordingly, it might be more properly described as philosophy of religion, as Julius Guttmann observes:
Even more than Islamic philosophy, it was definitely a philosophy of religion. Whereas the Islamic Neoplatonists and Aristotelians dealt with the full range of philosophy, Jewish thinkers relied for the most part on the work of their Islamic predecessors in regard to general philosophic questions, and concentrated on more specifically religio-philosophic problems....the great majority of Jewish thinkers made the philosophic justification of Judaism their main subject, dealing with problems of metaphysics in a religio-philosophic context.3
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Notes
Though not as widely ignored as the Arabic philosophers, these Jewish thinkers are nevertheless largely neglected in favour of Christian writers; I have never seen a selection from even Maimonides included in a philosophy of religion reader, and his proofs for the existence of God are sometimes grossly misrepresented (as in Jacob B. Agus, The Evolution of Jewish Thought from Biblical Times to the Opening of the Modern Era [London and New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1959], p. 185).
Frederick C. Copleston, A History of Medieval Philosophy (London: Methuen & Co., 1972), p. 105.
Julius Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism: The History of Jewish Philosophy from Biblical Times to Franz Rosenzweig, with an Introduction by R. J. Z. Werblowsky, trans. David W. Silverman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 55.
See G. Vajda, ‘Le “kalâm” dans la pensée religieuse juive du Moyen Age’, Revue de l’histoire des religions 183 (1973): 143–60;
Louis-Émile Blanchet, ‘L’infini dans les pensées juive et arabes’, Laval théologique et philosophique 32 (1976): 11–21.
Harry Austryn Wolfson, ‘Notes on Proofs of the Existence of God in Jewish Philosophy’, in Hebrew Union College Annual 1 (1924): 584.
Isaac Husik, A History of Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1940), p. 23.
Saadia was the first to ‘set up a comprehensive system of religious philosophy’ demonstrating ‘the superiority of Judaism’ over other religious systems and over the doctrines of the philosophers [Henry Malter, Saadia Gaon: His Life and Works the Morris Loeb Series (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1921), p. 175.]; accordingly, he ‘deserves to be considered the father of medieval Jewish philosophy of religion’ (Guttmann, Philosophies p. 61).
See Martin Schreiner, ‘Sa‘adja b. Josef al-Fajjûmî’, in Dreizehnter Bericht über die Lehranstahlt für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums in Berlin (Berlin: 1895), pp. 59; Guttmann, Philosophies p. 62; Husik, History pp. 25–6.
Saadia Gaon, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, trans. Samuel Rosenblatt (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1948), pp. 41–4.
For a discussion of Saadia’s first three proofs, see Harry Austryn Wolfson, ‘The Kalam Arguments for Creation in Saadia, Averroes, Maimonides and St. Thomas’, in Saadia Anniversary Volume, Texts and Studies, vol. 2 (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1943), pp. 197–207;
Herbert A. Davidson, ‘John Philoponus as a source of Medieval Islamic and Jewish Proofs of Creation’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 89 (1969): 362–70.
Z. Diesendruck, ‘Saadya’s Formulation of the Time-argument for Creation’, in Jewish Studies in Memory of George Alexander Kohut, 1874–1933, ed. S. W. Baron and A. Marx (New York: Bloch, 1935), p. 154.
Husik, History, p. 236. In the words of J. H. Hertz, The popular Jewish estimate of him is reflected in the contemporary saying…, “From Moses to Moses, there never arose a man like Moses”; while to the non-Jewish world, he has ever been the Jewish philosopher and the Jewish theologian’ (J. H. Hertz, ‘Moses Maimonides: A General Estimate’, in Moses Maimonides: VII Ith Centenary Volume, ed. I. Epstein [London: Socino Press, 1935], pp. 3–4).
Leo Strauss, ‘The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed’, in Essays on Maimonides: An Octocentennial Volume, ed. Salo Wittmayer Baron (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), p. 44.
Maimonides, Guide 2. intro. All quotations from the Guide will be from Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, 2nd ed. rev., trans. M. Friedländer (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1928).
Ibid. Maimonides believed that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo was both religiously superior and philosophically more probable than the eternity of the universe (ibid., 2.22, 23). But all his proofs for God’s existence take for granted the eternity of the universe. For more on this, see E. L. Fackenheim, ‘The Possibility of the Universe in Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and Maimonides’, Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 16 (1946–47): 57–70;
Mâjid Fakhry, ‘The “Antinomy” of the Eternity of the World in Averroes, Maimonides and Aquinas’, Le Museon 66 (1953): 139–55;
Georg Wieland, ‘Die Gottesbeweise des Moses Maimonides and die Ewigkeit der Welt’, Philosophisches Jahrbuch 82 (1975): 72–89. For a good overall discussion of Maimonides’s four proofs, see George C. Papademetriou, ‘Moses Maimonides’ Doctrine of God’, DIAOEODIA 4 (1974): 306–29; Wieland, ‘Gottesbeweise’, pp. 77–84.
Moses Maimonides to R. Samuel ibn Tibbon, cited in S. Munk, Commentary to Le Guide des Égares (Paris: A. Franck, 1861), p. 39.
For a further discussion on this aspect of Maimonides’s thought, see T.-L. Penido, ‘Les attributs de Dieu d’apres Maimonide’, Revue Néo-Scholastique de Philosophie 26 (1924): 137–63;
H. A. Wolfson, ‘The Amphibolous Terms in Aristotle, Arabic Philosophy, and Maimonides’, Harvard Theological Review 31 (1938): 151–73;
H. A. Wolfson, ‘Maimonides on Negative Attributes’, in Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume (New York: Jewish Publications, 1945), pp. 419–46;
Joseph A. Buijs, ‘Comments on Maimonides’ Negative Theology’, New Scholasticism 49 (1975): 87–93;
Clyde Lee Miller, ‘Maimonides and Aquinas on Naming God’, Journal of Jewish Studies 28 (1977): 65–71.
John O. Riedl, ‘Maimonides and Scholasticism’, New Scholasticism 10 (1936): 27–8.
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© 1980 William Lane Craig
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Craig, W.L. (1980). Jewish Philosophers of Religion. In: The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz. Library of Philosophy and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04993-6_4
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