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JEWISH PHILOSOPHY |
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Select: Philo Judaeus -- Isaac Israeli -- Saadia -- Al-Mukammas Ibn Gabriol -- Abraham bar Hiyya Philo Judaeus - (c. 25 B.C. - c. 50 A.D.) (Also known as Philo of Alexandria) Main Ideas:
The importance of Philo (picture) to the history of philosophy is incomparably greater than the power of his personality or the relevance of his personal thinking. For about seventeen centuries his example was, consciously and unconsciously, followed by all European thinkers, notwithstanding their differences, no matter whether they were nominalists or realists, idealists or naturalists, orthodox or heretics, and today Catholic Neo-Scholasticism is still following him, not to mention his influence on Islamic and Jewish philosophy. Philo was the first thinker to introduce into epistemology, metaphysics, physics and ethics the problem of reconciling speculative thought with the data of Biblical revelation; or, rather, he established these data, especially their characteristics of God, Man and Nature as the perfect truth with which the philosopher had to harmonize the results of his thinking. In this way, Philo created a spiritual situation, completely unknown in pagan Greek philosophy, which had not to regard Sacred Scripture as the standard and source of truth. The impact of the belief in the pagan gods on philosophical thoughts had only occasionally caused conflicts and had become negligible. As a support support of thinking, as a source of knowledge, the belief in the pagan gods was of no account even when some philosophers used the gods as symbols of forces which were comprehended by speculative methods. Philo initiated a new era in the history of philosophy, the earliest documents of which can be noted in the Gospel of St. John. Its great development begins with the Fathers of the Church, comprises the whole Middle Ages and part of modern times, Descartes included. It was Spinoza, a Jew like Philo, who removed Biblical revelation from the realm of philosophy. But, unlike Spinoza, Philo, a contemporary of Jesus Christ and St. Paul, remained a faithful, professing Jew. He devoted the main part of his life to the interpretation of the Pentateuch and to the defense of the Jewish faith against attacks on the part of gentile critics by explaining the essence of Judaism from the historical, philosophical, ethical and juridical points of view. When he was elected leader of a Jewish embassy to Rome in 40 A.D., he tried also to defend his co-religionists against the arbitrary power of Emperor Caligula. Although Philo borrowed much from Greek philosophers, his system deviates widely from purely Greek lines. It is the doctrine of monotheistic mysticism, teaching that human mind is capable, by intuition, not by reasoning, to apprehend God's existence but not His nature. In this way, Philo was the first to outline a psychology of faith. In The Radical Academy
Isaac Israeli - (c. 850 - 950) Isaac Israeli (picture), who, during the one hundred years of his life, was a famous physician and founder of an influential medical school, did not escape the fate of many other philosophers whose renown was founded upon their nonphilosophical activities. But it is just that objection made by some leaders of philosophical schools that he has written his philosophical books from the medical point of view, which should attract the interest of modern scholars. For his description of the faculty of cognition and his distinction between the impressions received by "the five sense" and the post-sensatory perceptions who him to have been an acute psychologist whose hints at anthropology anticipated modern discoveries. His principal work Kitab al Istiksat, written in Arabic, was translated into Hebrew under the title Sefer Hayesodoth and into Latin under the title De Elementis. He also wrote a treatise on definitions and commentaries on Genesis and the mystical Sefer Yetzirah, the oldest Cabalistic work which is extant. Israeli practiced medicine at Cairo, Egypt, and later at Kairwan, Tunisia. The Christian monk Constantine of Carthage translated several of Israeli's medical treatises into Latin in 1087, and used them as textbooks at the University of Salerno, the earliest university in Western Europe, but he omitted the real author's name, which was finally made known to the European public only in 1515 when Opera Omnia Isaci was printed at Lyons, France. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
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Important Works:
A religious philosopher, Bible exegete, apologist, and liturgical poet, Saadia ben Joseph, known as Saadia Gaon, was head of the Talmudic academy of Sura, Babylonia -- then under Muslim Arab rule -- and spiritual head of Babylonian Jewry Until Saadia began to formulate his ideas, the spiritual atmosphere of his times had been, as one of his contemporaries complained, as follows:
And so it became Saadia's purpose to teach not only his Jewish co-religionists but also Islamic and Christian thinkers that faith is not opposed to reason but only to pseudo-reason. Born in Egypt, and educated as well in all branches of Arabian culture as in Biblical and Talmudic scholarship, Saadia went to Palistine, and then to Babylonia. There he accomplished his great work which became the foundation of Jewish philosophy and science. Acquainted with Greek philosophy, the various formulations of the Christian dogma, the doctrines of the Manicheans, of Zoroaster and even with the philosophy of India, Saadia developed the idea that Judaism is compatible with all truth, whatever its source. In his explanation of the nature of religion, the character of man and the way of conceiving God, Saadia criticized Plato's cosmology and refuted gnostic doctrines. He tried to reconcile the idea of freedom of man with that of the all-embracing foreknowledge of God. Saadia was also a learned mathematician and a trained philologist, and he was the first to compose a Hebrew grammar and an Order of Prayer. He also wrote religious poetry and a commentary on the mystical Book of Creation. Of great importance to Arabic-speaking Jewry were his translations of the Bible from the Hebrew into Arabic and his Arabic commentary on the Scriptures. Best known is Saadia's Book of Beliefs and Opinions. Written in Arabic, it expounds a system of Jewish faith, influenced by Muslim rational theology and Aristotelianism, which harmoniously combines revelation and reason.
David Ibn Merwan Al-Mukammas - (Died c. 937) Al-Mukammas was born in Babylon and he was author of the earliest known Jewish philosophical work of the Middle Ages -- a commentary to the Sefer Yetzirah (the Book of Formation) -- chiefly responsible for the development of the Cabbalah. Al-Mukammas' manuscripts lay forgotten for centuries. The aforementioned was discovered in 1898 in the Tsarist Library. Fragments of another work on the unity God were found in the basement of a Cairo synagogue. Al-Mukammas established three ascending categories of science: practical philosophy, theoretical philosophy, and knowledge of the Torah.
Solomon ibn Gabriol - (c.1021 - c. 1058) Main Ideas:
Important Works:
Solomon ben Judah ibn Gabirol (picture) was a Jewish poet and philosopher who lived in Muslim Spain. His enormous poetic output (over 400 extant poems) were both secular and religious. From the middle of the twelfth to the end of the fourteenth century, Dominicans and Franciscans struggled with great bitterness over the ideas expressed in the book Fons Vitae, which the monk Dominicus Gundisalvi, assisted by the baptized Jew John Hispalensis, had translated from the Arabic. Its author was called Avicebron. The Franciscans, among them famous philosophers like Alexander of Hales and Duns Scotus, accepted its ideas and used it as a source for their own work, while the majority of the Domincans, including Thomas Aquinas, opposed them. The importance of Fons Vitae as a source of medieval neo-Platonism can hardly be exaggerated. It was not until 1840 that the great orientalist Salomon Munk discovered the real author of the book -- namely, Solomon ibn Gabirol, who, up to then, was known only as one of the great Spanish-Jewish poets. The Hebrew title of Gabirol's book is Mekor Hayim (Fountain of Life). It deals with the total subject matter from the point of view of the antagonism of form and matter, and establishes a hierarchy of all things, a graduation which, on each higher level, shows a more perfect relation between form and matter. By far the best known of his religious poetry is Keter Malkhut ("The Kingly Crown"), a long philosophical poem that Sephardic Jews still include in their prayer book for the Day of Atonement. The ideas presented are akin to those of Gabirol's chief philosophic work, Mekor Hayyim, parts of which have been translated under the title The Fountain of Life, a metaphysical discussion that combines neo-Platonism with traditional Jewish philosophy. His ethical treatise The Improvement of the Moral Qualities reflects a similar synthesis and is regarded as the first attempt to separate ethics from a purely religious framework. Gabirol, who continued to express his Jewish convictions in his poetry, dealt with the philosophical problems of his metaphysical work without any relation to Judaism. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Abraham bar Hiyya - (c. 1065 - 1136) While Christianity and Islam met each other on the battlefield, Abraham bar Hiyya, called by his fellow Jews "the prince," and by non-Jews "Savasorda," took a leading part in promoting spiritual interchange between the representatives of the Christian and Arabic civilizations, without neglecting his principal task, namely the vindication of the Jewish faith and its harmonization with science and philosophy. His treatise on areas and measurements which introduced new scientific terms and new methods for the measurement of surfaces, was translated into Latin under the title Liber Embadorum, and, for centuries, it remained a standard work. His contributions to mathematics, astonomy, music and optics were highly appreciated by Jewish, Christian and Moslem scholars. In his Hegyon Hanefesh (Reflection on the Soul), Abraham bar Hiyya, while exposing his ideas on creation and the destiny and conduct of Man, showed a strong inclination to an ascetic conception of life. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
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