A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy

With Maimonides we reach the high water mark of mediæval Jewish philosophy. He was by far the most comprehensive mind of mediæval Jewry, and his philosophy was the coping stone...

Of the post-Maimonidean philosophers Crescas is the last who contributes original views of philosophical value. Joseph Albo, of Monreal in Aragon, is of little importance as a p...

What was poison to Judah Halevi is meat to Abraham Ibn Daud. We must, he says, investigate the principles of the Jewish religion and seek to harmonize them with true philosophy....

In Judah Halevi the poet got the better of the rationalist. Not that Judah Halevi was not familiar with philosophical thinking and did not absorb the current philosophical termi...

Among the men who devoted themselves to philosophical investigation in the century and a half after Maimonides's death, the greatest and most independent was without doubt Levi...

All that is known of the life of Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda is that he lived in Spain and had the office of "Dayyan," or judge of the Jewish community. Not even the exact time...

Saadia was the first important Jewish philosopher. Philo of Alexandria does not come within our purview as he was not mediæval. Besides his work is not systematic, being in the...

Little is known of the life of Joseph ben Jacob ibn Zaddik. He lived in Cordova; he was appointed _Dayyan_, or Judge of the Jewish community of that city in 1138; and he died in...

The chronological treatment of Jewish philosophy which we have followed makes it necessary at this point to take up a Karaite work of the fourteenth century that is closely mode...

With Gabirol the scene of Jewish intellectual activity changes from the east to the west. Prior to the middle of the tenth century the centre of Jewish learning was in Babylonia...

The influence of Aristotle on Jewish thought, which began as early as Saadia and grew in intensity as the Aristotelian writings became better known, reached its high water mark...

We know next to nothing about the condition of the Jews in Mohammedan Egypt in the ninth and tenth centuries. But the fact that the two first Jewish writers who busied themselve...

In the post-Maimonidean age all philosophical thinking is in the nature of a commentary on Maimonides whether avowedly or not. The circle of speculation and reflection is comple...

Among the Jewish Neo-Platonists must be included the two Ibn Ezras, Moses and Abraham. They were contemporary and came from Spain. Moses, the older of the two, was born at Grana...

Abraham bar Hiyya, the Prince, as he is called, lived in Spain in the first half of the twelfth century. He also seems to have stayed some time in southern France, though we do...

Joseph ben Abraham, euphemistically surnamed on account of his blindness, al-Basir (the seer), was a Karaite and lived in Babylonia or Persia in the beginning of the eleventh ce...

It had been known for a number of years that there was a manuscript treatise in Arabic on the soul, which was attributed on the title page to Bahya. In 1896 Isaac Broydé publish...

Nothing was known of Al Mukammas until recently when fragments of his philosophical work were found in Judah ben Barzilai's commentary on the Sefer Yezirah.[35] The latter tells...