Marvin Fox

Fox, Marvin. Interpreting Maimonides: Studies in Methodology, Metaphysics, and Moral Philosophy. University of Chicago Press, 1995.

This book begins, in its first chapter ‘The Many-sided Maimonides’, with the observation that “It is remarkable that despite the vast literature on many aspects of the work of Moses Maimonides, we do not have even one comprehensive study of his thought that compares in quality and scope to the great works that have been written on almost every important Western philosopher.” He then cites several such comprehensive studies, e.g., Wolfson’s Philosophy of Spinoza. This is despite the fact that, “in the eight hundred years since the Guide first appeared, there has never been a time when interest in the Guide was absent … Maimonides has never disappeared from the Jewish scholarly agenda.”

Marvin Fox attributes this to the esoteric nature of the Guide, and to the seemingly conflicting ideological commitments which Maimonides seems to espouse in his philosophical writing. There is also the matter of Maimonides’ towering stature in the Jewish (and broad mediaeval) canon, which makes it a weighty task to claim to give an authoritative account of his thought. The result, Fox says, is that “We still cannot say with certainty just what could be considered a thoroughly reliable account of Maimonides’ doctrines”.

Will Marvin Fox give us such an account? It is not clear, although we do read the author’s admission that “My own studies of Maimonides began in my early youth, and he has never ceased to occupy my thought and my attention. … To add to the existing literature takes a certain boldness. … Over the years I have become convinced that there are, in fact, many dimensions of Maimondes’ work that have not been grasped or explicated as correctly or as fully as possible.” His ideological commitments are clear: “I consider Maimonides to be the greatest and most creative Jewish thinker since the close of the Talmud.”

In my estimation, Marvin Fox’s book represents the best that a Maimonides tafsir can be, because it comes from a writer who is convinced, sincerely, that Maimonides’ work has a lot to offer the modern reader, and works eloquently to show us what this is. His closing chapter, The Significance of Maimonides for contemporary Judaism sums up the insights that he distills for us, guiding us toward “one of the greatest of all teachers, whose voice speaks effectively to our own age.”

Herbert Davidson

Davidson, Herbert A. Moses Maimonides: the man and his works. Oxford University Press on Demand, 2005.

This book has a different flavor; the author is not as abashedly a disciple of the Great Eagle as Marvin Fox declares himself to be. It’s different in at least two ways:

  • For one thing, Davidson works much more methodically and matter-of-factly than Marvin Fox. You get the sense that he is a ‘no-nonsense’ writer, who has before him a subject and works through his subject matter like a thorough scholar. In contrast, Marvin Fox writes almost like a hagiographer (though he is no less ‘scholarly’ than Davidson), one who is in awe of Maimonides. You don’t get this sense from Davidson.
  • The second difference is that Davidson covers both his rabbinic work and his philosophical and medical work.
  • Davidson is almost critical of Maimonides when he writes about his philosophical work. He claims, for instance, that Maimonides was not as well-read in Aristotle as people have often assumed, or as much as he seems to imply in his own writing. He does this by examining the materials available to Maimonides based on the records that we have; unless more information comes to light, he may be right in his conclusions, which are rather deflating … (more to come)

Oliver Leaman

Leaman, Oliver. Moses Maimonides. Routledge, 2013.

This is a really perceptive and thoughtful book about Maimonides’ thought. It starts with a chapter on “How can we talk about God?” which delves deep into the weeds about the fact that Maimonides’ God is so utterly removed from our earthly existence that he seems impossibly remote; if God cannot even be described by words, then can we say anything at all about him? Clearly, as a believer in revelation, Maimonides thinks that we can, but his theology seems on the surface to be extremely uncompromising and seems to leave little room for saying anything very meaningful about God.

I like how intellectually honest this book is: it presents serious intellectual challenges, and does not pretend to necessarily solve them. Instead, it gives us a thorough account of what Maimonides said, the different ways in which we can make sense of what he said, and the questions it leaves open. He also does a good job of placing Maimonides in the greater Arabophone and Islamic-philosophical context, exaplaining at length how and in what manner Maimonides engaged with the various Kalam schools.

It may be that the heavenes operate along the same rules as our everyday world, but we must allow the possibility that there is a difference. Once we allow such a possibility, we make room for the notion of divine intervention in the world. Maimonides is quite clear that if we cannot talk about God creating the world in time and out of his free will, then there is no role in our religion for miracles, for the Law, or for anything which implies the influence of something from without the world upon the world. He is equally clear that we cannot be said to know that the world was created in time, but that this is an hypothesis which is slightly more probably than its contrary. We thus have a choice. We can either acept that the world was created in time, or refuse to accept this. In the first case we can then accept the description in the religion of the miracles, prophecy and so on, since they fit in closely with the notion of a purposive deity bringing about change in the material world thorugh its free will. In the second case we can refuse to accept this form of description , and we should be obliged to interpret figuratively the stories about miracles and prophecy which we find in the scriptures.

Leaman reminds us that this is why Maimonides chose to establish the existence, unity, and incorporeality of God starting from the premise that the world is eternal. If the world were created in time, then religion is on solid ground anyway. But we cannot know this for sure, so Maimonides has ‘covered his bases’ by showing that the essential features of God continue to be valid even under that assumption, even if miracles and prophecy do not.

The first option leads to a rationally-grounded belief system, which is the path of Maimonides. According to Leaman, this path is rationally grounded even if the underlying premise (creation in time, or a God acting with free will) is false. “We could never tell what the truth value of the presupposition is … and we are restricted to a judgement concerning its probability. Yet the issue of its truth or falsity does not matter. If it is true then we can adhere to a traditional version of religion, and if it is not true, we can switch to a modified version which still manages to capture the essential features of the existing faith.” As long as creation is possible, prophecy is possible, and miracles are possible, religious belief of the Maimonidean variety remains rationally grounded. In GP.II.25, Maimonides uses exactly this route to philosophical grounded-ness: “Accepting the Creation, we find that miracles are possible, that Revelation is possible, and that every difficulty in this question is removed.”

Norbert Samuelson

Samuelson, N. (1996). A Case Study in Jewish Ethics—Three Jewish Strategies for Solving Theodicy, The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, 5(2), 177-190. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/105369996790231424

(should probably collect these and others into a bib file at some point)

This article looks at three different “Jewish strategies” toward the problem of Theodicy. The third one is what interests us here.

On Cohen’s understanding of Maimonides (and through Maimonides, of authentic Judaism), divine attributes are to be understood as moral ideals. In general, given any simple, affIrmative predicate, P, what it means to say that God is P is that God is not Q, where Q is the complement of P. Hence, to say that God is good means that He is not bad, that He is powerful means that He is not weak, etc. The problem is, however, that to be able to predicate any P of God would render God-talk unintelligible, for why can we not say God is Q, which correctly means that literally God is not P, since no attribute literally understood can be predicated of God? Maimonides’ answer is that we may predicate of God only those attributes that the Torah affirms of Him, and the reason why Scripture sayswhat it says is because the affirmed attributes are all human excellences. In other words, all statements about God are in reality disguised moral imperatives, where a statement of the narrative form, “God is P” means the commandment, “Strive to become P.” ‘What links the declaration to the imperative is the principle of holiness, viz., “You shall be holy as I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev 19:2). In other words, the content of theological statements about God is entirely ethical, and the religion of the people of Israel who proclaim them is a political program to redeem the world. This Cohenian reading of Maimonides’ theology has informed all subsequent Jewish theology.

Alfred Ivry

Ivry, Alfred L.. Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed: A Philosophical Guide. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Alfred Ivry’s masterful work revives the long tradition of textual commentaries on the Guide. To my knowledge, it is the first chapter-by-chapter, systematic commentary on the Guide in the English language, period, and the first commentary since Leo Strauss’ introduction to Shlomo Pines’ translation.

This book is divided into sections that follow the order of the Guide, but the sections are arranged according to Ivry’s own systematization. Each section consists of a paraphrase section and an analysis section, where the paraphrase is marked by vertical lines running along the margins of the text. The sections he divides the Guide into are:

  1. Wrestling with Language
  2. Kalam claims and counterclaims
  3. Philosophy affirmed and qualified; Creation
  4. Prophecy
  5. The metaphysics of the chariot
  6. Providence and (Apparent) Evil
  7. Rationalizing the Law
  8. True Knowledge and Perfection

In my opinion, what makes Alfred Ivry’s ‘Philosophical Guide’ a distinctive contribution to the commenatarial tradition is that his Maimonides is somewhat human. For Ivry, the Rambam himself was one of the ‘perplexed’ for whom the Guide was written. Ivry teases out from within the intricate structure of the Guide a story of a man who began writing dalalat al-ha’irin thinking that he was going to prove, definitively, the truths of scripture using the intellectual machinery of the Graeco-Arabic philosophical tradition. In the course of writing the book, however, Maimonides finds his own commitments challenged, both his philosophical ones and his religious ones. Thus, the Guide

veers from … an impersonal to a personal God; from treating the Bible literally to viewing it allegorically; from valorizing the study of metaphysics to doubting its veracity; and from treating observance of the Law as instrumental to viewing it as essential to achieving perfection.

For Ivry, the Guide can be seen as

a spiritual biography in which Maimondies lays out his beliefs and his disbeliefs, his doubts and his certainties, all subject to qualification…. The overwhelming thrust of the Guide is to construct a view of God that is logically consistent and philosophically persuasive, however undemonstrated… The structures of his metaphysical beliefs were wobbly at best, but he chose no other framework on which to hang his religious beliefs.

The conclusion to his conclusion reads:

Today, we can dismiss the astronomy and celestial physics with which Maimonides struggled, the theories that supported emanationism and prophetology, and still warm to the concept of an ultimate source of the existence and continued being of the world, a source whose effects upon us we may personify as deliberate and wise. We still search for scientific knowledge, transcending personal subjectivities to join with what we view as universal truths. This can give us immense satisfaction, even if we may not believe that it grants us personal immortality; but neither did Maimonides. He considered the pursuit of truth, and the possibility of attaining it (to some degree) in every sphere of science, including metaphysics, a divine and blessed task, one that Judaism should embrace. He tried to lay out a road map for his people that would keep them together and ultimately allow for personal happiness and spiritual fulfillment. His map was accepted, the final destination, as he philosophucally envisaged it, not.

‘The Rav’ Joseph Soloveitchik

Kaplan, Lawrence J.., ed. Maimonides: Between Philosophy and Halakhah: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Lectures on The Guide of the Perplexed. Urim Publications, 2016.

Joseph Soloveitchik has been called “The greatest modern philosopher produced by Orthodox Judaism” (Daniel Rynhold, The Journal of Religion 2018).

On deductive versus inductive approaches toward God:

  • Maimonides followed an inductive approach to God, in contrast with Spinoza’s deductive approach.
  • Spinoza: “I think the cause for such confusion is mainly, that they do not keep to the proper order of philosophic thinking. The nature of God, which should be reflected on first, inasmuch as it is prior both in the order of knowledge and the order of nature, they have taken to be last in the order of knowledge, and have put into the first place what they call the objects of sensation”
  • Maimonides: “there is nothing else in existence but God and His works, the latter including all existing things besides Him: we can only obtain a knowledge of Him through His works; His works give evidence of His existence, and show what must be assumed concerning Him, that is to say, what must be attributed to Him either affirmatively or negatively.
  • For Maimonides, the ‘proper order of philosophizing is man –> world –> God; for Spinoza, the proper order is God –> world –> man.
  • According to the Rav, both of these approaches toward the Divine lack apodicticity; he classifies as part of the ‘inductive’ approach, all those who built up ontological proofs for the existence of God, such as Anselm and presumably Ibn Sina. These ways of demonstrating the presence of God were invalidated by Kant, we are told. As for Maimonides’ valiant attempt to “demonstrate God’s existence through science”; this, too, he says, “can’t be done”.
  • Still, the Rav finds value in the Rambam’s approach because it represents what he calls “an empricist approach to God”. For Maimonides (says the Rav), “the experience of God and the experience of the universe are identical”.

On Maimonides’ subordination of Halakhic ethics to philosophical attainment.

  • Soloveitchik reads GP.III.54 and its clear-cut hierarchy between different kinds of perfection as having a certain degree of dissimulation.
  • Usually, people associate dissimulation to Maimonides in his attitude toward Halakhah. But Soloveitchik attributes dissimulation to Maimonides in his attitude toward philosophy.
  • This despite the fact that Soloveitchik claims to be explicitly against the idea that there is an ‘esoteric core’ hidden in the Guide. The Rav says, in his explication of the ‘motto’ of the Guide, that “ Maimonides … seeks to negate any educational policy of esotericisim”. Keep in mind that these lecture notes were written in 1951, well before Leo Strauss’ essay on the Guide came out in 1963
  • For Soloveitchik, while the text of the Guide may make it seem that Maimonides subordinates the halakhah to philosophy, the Rav takes as given the premise that the author of the Mishneh Torah and the Commentary on the Mishnah, the RMBM, הנשר הגדול, the one about whom it was said that “from Moses to Moses there was none like Moses”, could not possibly have thought that شريعة is subordinate to حكمة.

    “We are confronted here with a great problem and have to decide what Maimonides’ position is on these matters. Did he simply follow in Aristotle’s footsteps … was he not aware of the gap separating the Torah from peripatetic empiricism and ethical relativism? Did he not realize that the view that theoretical knowledge is the highest ideal and that ethical performance is only of practical value goes against the morality of the prophets? If so, his philosophy is of no value”

  • In my opinion, Maimonides is extremely clear in the last chapter of the Guide in the hierarchy he sets up between the different kinds of perfection available to man. Material well-being is less valuable than physical/physiological well-being, and physical/physiological well-being is less valuable than moral well-being, and moral well-being is less valuable than intellectual well-being. Each of these can be considered a preparatory stage for the next level of perfection.

    “The religious acts prescribed in the Law, viz., the various kinds of worship and the moral principles which benefit all people in their social intercourse with each other, do not constitute the ultimate aim of man, nor can they be compared to it, for they are but preparations leading to it.”

  • This hierarchy between moral and intellectual perfection appears to leave the Rav unsatisfied, and he mounts a multi-pronged attack on this (to me, pretty straightforward) reading of Maimonides. How does he resolve the problem?
  • Kaplan summarizes the Rav’s approach when he says in the Editor’s Introduction, “The Rav resolves [this problem] by distinguishing between two types of ethics: a pre-theoretical ethics and a post-theoretical ethics.” While pre-theoretical ethics is indeed subordinate to and merely a preapration for intellectual perfection, post-theoretical ethics arises out of intellectual perfection and constitutes the ultimate aim of man.

Maimonides’ “pantheism”:

  • With respect to existence and with respect to essence, Maimonides is a monist (Soloveitchik even uses the word ‘pantheist’). Things don’t have an existence independent of the existence of God, and they borrow their essence from God too. However, with respect to substance, Maimonides maintains a strict separation between God and the world.

Leo Strauss

Strauss, Leo. How to Begin to Study the Guide of the Perplexed, in Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, tr. Shlomo Pines.

Leo Strauss’ celebrated Introduction to Shlomo Pines’ translation of the Guide has achieved a mythical stature in the literature on Maimonides’ Guide. Strauss’ commentary should more properly be called an interpretation of the Guide, for it presents to us a Maimonides filtered through Strauss’ own ideas. Every commentary is an interpretation, of course, and Strauss is frank about his admiration of and devotion to the Guide (“twenty-five years of frequently interrupted but never abandoned study”; “the Guide as a whole is … an enchanted forest, and hence also an enchanting forest: it is a delight to the eyes.”)

Let us first review the plan of the Guide, “as it has become clear to me (Strauss) in the course of about twenty-five years of frequently interrupted but never abandoned study.”

  1. Biblical Terms applied to God
  2. Demonstrations of the existence, unity and incorporeality of God
  3. Prophecy
  4. The account of the Chariot
  5. Providence
  6. The actions commanded by God and done by God
  7. Man’s perfection and God’s providence.

Some excerpts:

Maimonides does say that the Account of the Beginning is the same as natural science and the Account of the Chariot is the same as divine science [metaphysics]. This might lead one to think that the public teaching is identical with what the philosophers teach, while the secret teaching makes one understand the identity of the teaching of the philosophers with the secret teaching of the Law. One can safely say that this thought proves to be untenable on almost every level of one’s comprehending the Guide: the nonidentity of the teaching of the philosophers as a whole and the thirteen roots of the Law as a whole are the first word and the last word of Maimonides.