bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Platonism in Islamic philosophy
Authors: Burrell David
Published: September 2018

Plato seems to have been more an icon and an inspiration than an authentic source for Islamic philosophers. So far as is known, the only works available to them in Arabic translation were the Laws, the Sophist, the Timaeus and the Republic. His name was often invoked as a sage and an exemplar of that wisdom available to humankind among the Greeks before the revelation of the Qur’an. This in itself could represent a kind of affront to orthodox Islam, which tended to view the human situation before the Qur’an’s ‘coming down’ as one of pervasive ignorance (jahaliyya). However, the rise of humanist culture in Baghdad during the ninth and tenth centuries ad, which involved Syriac Christian translators, presupposed a gradual acceptance of Greek wisdom in which Plato figured paradigmatically, even though far fewer of his works were made available in translation than those of Aristotle.
Islamic fundamentalism
Authors: Choueiri Youssef
Published: September 2018

The philosophical roots of Islamic fundamentalism are largely the result of a conscious attempt to revive and restate the theoretical relevance of Islam in the modern world. The writings of three twentieth-century Muslim thinkers and activists – Sayyid Qutb, Ayatollah Ruhollah al-Khumayni and Abu al-‘Ala al-Mawdudi – provide authoritative guidelines delineating the philosophical discourse of Islamic fundamentalism. However, whereas al-Khumayni and al-Mawdudi made original contributions towards formulating a new Islamic political theory, it was Qutb who offered a coherent exposition of Islam as a philosophical system.

Qutb’s philosophical system postulated a qualitative contradiction between Western culture and the religion of Islam. Its emphasis on Islam as a sui generis and transcendental set of beliefs excluded the validity of all other values and concepts. It also marked the differences between the doctrinal foundations of Islam and modern philosophical currents. Consequently Islamic fundamentalism is opposed to the Enlightenment, secularism, democracy, nationalism, Marxism and relativism. Its most original contribution resides in the formulation of the concept of God’s sovereignty or lordship. This concept is the keystone of its philosophical structure.

The premises of Islamic fundamentalism are rooted in an essentialist world view whereby innate qualities and attributes apply to individuals and human societies, irrespective of time, historical change or political circumstances. Hence, an immutable substance governs human existence and determines its outward movement.
Islamic philosophy, modern
Authors: Morewedge Parviz , Leaman Oliver
Published: September 2018

There are a number of major trends in modern Islamic philosophy. First, there is the challenge of the West to traditional Islamic philosophical and cultural principles and the desire to establish a form of thought which is distinctive. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Islamic philosophers have attempted to redefine Islamic philosophy; some, such as Hasan Hanafi and Ali Mazrui, have sought to give modern Islamic philosophy a global significance and provide an agenda for world unity.

Second, there is a continuing tradition of interest in illuminationist and mystical thought, especially in Iran where the influence of Mulla Sadra and al-Suhrawardi has remained strong. The influence of the latter can be seen in the works of Henry Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr; Mulla Sadra has exercised an influence over figures such as Mahdi Ha’iri Yazdi and the members of Qom School, notably Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The philosopher Abdul Soroush has introduced a number of concepts from Western philosophy into Iran.

Finally, there have been many thinkers who have adapted and employed philosophical ideas which are originally non-Islamic as part of the normal philosophical process of seeking to understand conceptual problems. This is a particularly active area, with a number of philosophers from many parts of the Islamic world investigating the relevance to Islam of concepts such as Hegelianism and existentialism. At the same time, mystical philosophy continues to exercise an important influence. Modern Islamic philosophy is thus quite diverse, employing a wide variety of techniques and approaches to its subject.
Soul in Islamic philosophy
Authors: Inati Shams C.
Published: September 2018

The discussion of the human soul, its existence, nature, ultimate objective and eternity, occupies a highly important position in Islamic philosophy and forms its main focus. For the most part Muslim philosophers agreed, as did their Greek predecessors, that the soul consists of non-rational and rational parts. The non-rational part they divided into the plant and animal souls, the rational part into the practical and the theoretical intellects. All believed that the non-rational part is linked essentially to the body, but some considered the rational part as separate from the body by nature and others that all the parts of the soul are by nature material. The philosophers agreed that, while the soul is in the body, its non-rational part is to manage the body, its practical intellect is to manage worldly affairs, including those of the body, and its theoretical intellect is to know the eternal aspects of the universe. They thought that the ultimate end or happiness of the soul depends on its ability to separate itself from the demands of the body and to focus on grasping the eternal aspects of the universe. All believed that the non-rational soul comes into being and unavoidably perishes. Some, like al-Farabi, believed that the rational soul may or may not survive eternally; others, like Ibn Sina, believed that it has no beginning and no end; still others, such as Ibn Rushd, believed that the soul with all its individual parts comes into existence and is eventually destroyed.
Science in Islamic philosophy
Authors: Sardar Ziauddin
Published: September 2018

Islam attempts to synthesize reason and revelation, knowledge and values, in its approach to the study of nature. Knowledge acquired through rational human efforts and through the Qur’an are seen as complementary: both are ‘signs of God’ that enable humanity to study and understand nature. Between the second and eighth centuries AH (eighth and fifteenth centuries ad), when Muslim civilization was at its zenith, metaphysics, epistemology and empirical studies of nature fused to produce an explosion of ‘scientific spirit’. Scientists and scholars such as Ibn al-Haytham, al-Razi, Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Sina and al-Biruni superimposed Plato’s and Aristotle’s ideas of reason and objectivity on their own Muslim faith, thus producing a unique synthesis of religion and philosophy. They also placed great emphasis on scientific methodology, giving importance to systematic observation, experimentation and theory building.

Initially, scientific inquiry was directed by everyday practices of Islam. For example, developments in astronomy were influenced by the fact that the times of Muslim prayer were defined astronomically and its direction was defined geographically. In the later stage, the quest for truth for its own sake became the norm, leading to numerous new discoveries and innovations. Muslim scientists did not recognize disciplinary boundaries between the ‘two cultures’ of science and humanities, and individual scholars tended as a general rule to be polymaths. Recently, Muslim scholars have started to develop a contemporary Islamic philosophy of science by combining such basic Islamic concepts as ‘ilm (knowledge), khilafa (trusteeship of nature) and istisla (public interest) in an integrated science policy framework.
Logic in Islamic philosophy
Authors: Black Deborah L.
Published: September 2018

Islamic logic was inspired primarily by Aristotle’s logical corpus, the Organon (which according to a late Greek taxonomy also included the Rhetoric and Poetics). Islamic authors were also familiar with some elements in Stoic logic and linguistic theory, and their logical sources included not only Aristotle’s own works but also the works of the late Greek Aristotelian commentators, the Isagōgēof Porphyry and the logical writings of Galen. However, most of the logical work of the Islamic philosophers remained squarely within the tradition of Aristotelian logic, and most of their writings in this area were in the form of commentaries on Aristotle.

For the Islamic philosophers, logic included not only the study of formal patterns of inference and their validity but also elements of the philosophy of language and even of epistemology and metaphysics. Because of territorial disputes with the Arabic grammarians, Islamic philosophers were very interested in working out the relationship between logic and language, and they devoted much discussion to the question of the subject matter and aims of logic in relation to reasoning and speech. In the area of formal logical analysis, they elaborated upon the theory of terms, propositions and syllogisms as formulated in Aristotle’s Categories, De interpretatione and Prior Analytics. In the spirit of Aristotle, they considered the syllogism to be the form to which all rational argumentation could be reduced, and they regarded syllogistic theory as the focal point of logic. Even poetics was considered as a syllogistic art in some fashion by most of the major Islamic Aristotelians.

Since logic was viewed as an organon or instrument by which to acquire knowledge, logic in the Islamic world also incorporated a general theory of argumentation focused upon epistemological aims. This element of Islamic logic centred upon the theory of demonstration found in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, since demonstration was considered the ultimate goal sought by logic. Other elements of the theory of argumentation, such as dialectics and rhetoric, were viewed as secondary to demonstration, since it was held that these argument forms produced cognitive states inferior in certitude and stability to demonstration. The philosopher’s aim was ultimately to demonstrate necessary and certain truth; the use of dialectical and rhetorical arguments was accounted for as preparatory to demonstration, as defensive of its conclusions, or as aimed at communicating its results to a broader audience.
al-Farabi, Abu Nasr (c.870–950)
Authors: Netton Ian Richard
Published: September 2018

Al-Farabi was known to the Arabs as the ‘Second Master’ (after Aristotle), and with good reason. It is unfortunate that his name has been overshadowed by those of later philosophers such as Ibn Sina, for al-Farabi was one of the world’s great philosophers and much more original than many of his Islamic successors. A philosopher, logician and musician, he was also a major political scientist.

Al-Farabi has left us no autobiography and consequently, relatively little is known for certain about his life. His philosophical legacy, however, is large. In the arena of metaphysics he has been designated the ‘Father of Islamic Neoplatonism’, and while he was also saturated with Aristotelianism and certainly deploys the vocabulary of Aristotle, it is this Neoplatonic dimension which dominates much of his corpus. This is apparent in his most famous work, al-Madina al-fadila (The Virtuous City) which, far from being a copy or a clone of Plato’s Republic, is imbued with the Neoplatonic concept of God. Of course, al-Madina al-fadila has undeniable Platonic elements but its theology, as opposed to its politics, places it outside the mainstream of pure Platonism.

In his admittedly complex theories of epistemology, al-Farabi has both an Aristotelian and Neoplatonic dimension, neither of which is totally integrated with the other. His influence was wide and extended not only to major Islamic philosophers such as Ibn Sina who came after him, and to lesser mortals such as Yahya ibn ‘Adi, al-Sijistani, al-‘Amiri and al-Tawhidi, but also to major thinkers of Christian medieval Europe including Thomas Aquinas.
Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi al-Din (1164–1240)
Authors: Robinson Neal
Published: September 2018

Ibn al-‘Arabi was a mystic who drew on the writings of Sufis, Islamic theologians and philosophers in order to elaborate a complex theosophical system akin to that of Plotinus. He was born in Murcia (in southeast Spain) in AH 560/ad 1164, and died in Damascus in AH 638/ad 1240. Of several hundred works attributed to him the most famous are al-Futuhat al-makkiyya (The Meccan Illuminations) and Fusus al-hikam (The Bezels of Wisdom). The Futuhat is an encyclopedic discussion of Islamic lore viewed from the perspective of the stages of the mystic path. It exists in two editions, both completed in Damascus – one in AH 629/ad 1231 and the other in AH 636/ad 1238 – but the work was conceived in Mecca many years earlier, in the course of a vision which Ibn al-‘Arabi experienced near the Kaaba, the cube-shaped House of God which Muslims visit on pilgrimage. Because of its length, this work has been relatively neglected. The Fusus, which is much shorter, comprises twenty-seven chapters named after prophets who epitomize different spiritual types. Ibn al-‘Arabi claimed that he received it directly from Muhammad, who appeared to him in Damascus in AH 627/ad 1229. It has been the subject of over forty commentaries.

Although Ibn al-‘Arabi was primarily a mystic who believed that he possessed superior divinely-bestowed knowledge, his work is of interest to the philosopher because of the way in which he used philosophical terminology in an attempt to explain his inner experience. He held that whereas the divine Essence is absolutely unknowable, the cosmos as a whole is the locus of manifestation of all God’s attributes. Moreover, since these attributes require the creation for their expression, the One is continually driven to transform itself into Many. The goal of spiritual realization is therefore to penetrate beyond the exterior multiplicity of phenomena to a consciousness of what subsequent writers have termed the ‘unity of existence’. This entails the abolition of the ego or ‘passing away from self’ (fana’) in which one becomes aware of absolute unity, followed by ‘perpetuation’ (baqa’) in which one sees the world as at once One and Many, and one is able to see God in the creature and the creature in God.
Ibn Khaldun, ‘Abd al-Rahman (1332–1406)
Authors: Issawi Charles , Leaman Oliver
Published: September 2018

Ibn Khaldun’s work on the philosophy of history is a landmark of social thought. Many historians – Greek, Roman, Muslim and other – had written valuable historiography, but here we have brilliant reflections on the meaning, pattern and laws of history and society, as well as profound insights into the nature of social processes and the interconnections between phenomena in such diverse fields as politics, economics, sociology and education. By any reckoning, Ibn Khaldun was the outstanding figure in the social sciences between Aristotle and Machiavelli, and one of the greatest philosophers of history of all time.

His most important philosophical work is the Muqaddima, the introduction to a much longer history of the Arabs and Berbers. In this work, Ibn Khaldun clearly defines a science of culture and expounds on the nature of human society and on political and social cycles. Different social groups, nomads, townspeople and traders, interact with and affect one another in a continuous pattern. Religion played an important part in Ibn Khaldun’s conception of the state, and he followed al-Ghazali rather than Ibn Rushd as a surer guide to the truth.
Ibn Sina, Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn (980–1037)
Authors: Kemal Salim
Published: September 2018

Ibn Sina (Avicenna) is one of the foremost philosophers in the Medieval Hellenistic Islamic tradition that also includes al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd. His philosophical theory is a comprehensive, detailed and rationalistic account of the nature of God and Being, in which he finds a systematic place for the corporeal world, spirit, insight, and the varieties of logical thought including dialectic, rhetoric and poetry.

Central to Ibn Sina’s philosophy is his concept of reality and reasoning. Reason, in his scheme, can allow progress through various levels of understanding and can finally lead to God, the ultimate truth. He stresses the importance of gaining knowledge, and develops a theory of knowledge based on four faculties: sense perception, retention, imagination and estimation. Imagination has the principal role in intellection, as it can compare and construct images which give it access to universals. Again the ultimate object of knowledge is God, the pure intellect.

In metaphysics, Ibn Sina makes a distinction between essence and existence; essence considers only the nature of things, and should be considered apart from their mental and physical realization. This distinction applies to all things except God, whom Ibn Sina identifies as the first cause and therefore both essence and existence. He also argued that the soul is incorporeal and cannot be destroyed. The soul, in his view, is an agent with choice in this world between good and evil, which in turn leads to reward or punishment.

Reference has sometimes been made to Ibn Sina’s supposed mysticism, but this would appear to be based on a misreading by Western philosophers of parts of his work. As one of the most important practitioners of philosophy, Ibn Sina exercised a strong influence over both other Islamic philosophers and medieval Europe. His work was one of the main targets of al-Ghazali’s attack on Hellenistic influences in Islam. In Latin translations, his works influenced many Christian philosophers, most notably Thomas Aquinas.
Mulla Sadra (Sadr al-Din Muhammad al-Shirazi) (1571/2–1640)
Authors: Cooper John
Published: September 2018

Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi (Mulla Sadra) is perhaps the single most important and influential philosopher in the Muslim world in the last four hundred years. The author of over forty works, he was the culminating figure of the major revival of philosophy in Iran in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Devoting himself almost exclusively to metaphysics, he constructed a critical philosophy which brought together Peripatetic, Illuminationist and gnostic philosophy along with Shi‘ite theology within the compass of what he termed a ‘metaphilosophy’, the source of which lay in the Islamic revelation and the mystical experience of reality as existence.

Mulla Sadra’s metaphilosophy was based on existence as the sole constituent of reality, and rejected any role for quiddities or essences in the external world. Existence was for him at once a single unity and an internally articulated dynamic process, the unique source of both unity and diversity. From this fundamental starting point, Mulla Sadra was able to find original solutions to many of the logical, metaphysical and theological difficulties which he had inherited from his predecessors. His major philosophical work is the Asfar (The Four Journeys), which runs to nine volumes in the present printed edition and is a complete presentation of his philosophical ideas.
Ibn ar-Rawandi (c.910?)
Authors: Inati Shams C.
Published: September 2018

A highly enigmatic and controversial figure in the history of Islamic thought, Ibn ar-Rawandi wavered between a number of Islamic sects and then abandoned all of them in favour of atheism. As an atheist, he used reason to destroy religious beliefs, especially those of Islam. He compared prophets to unnecessary magicians, God to a human being in terms of knowledge and emotion, and the Qur’an to an ordinary book. Contrary to Islamic belief, he advocated that the world is without a beginning and that heaven is nothing special.
al-Tusi, Khwajah Nasir (1201–74)
Authors: Cooper John
Published: September 2018

While philosophical activity in the Islamic west virtually ceased after Ibn Rushd at the close of the sixth century AH (twelfth century ad), it experienced renewed vigour in the east through the intellectual efforts and political involvement of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Although primarily a reviver of the peripatetic tradition of Ibn Sina, he was also possibly influenced by the ideas of al-Suhrawardi. He defended Ibn Sina from the criticisms levelled against him from the direction of theology, notably by Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, made a significant contribution to the acceptance of metaphysical argumentation and terminology in Twelver Shi‘i theology, brought the ethical tradition of Ibn Miskawayh and the philosophers into the centre of Islamic ethical discourse, and had a lasting effect on the study of the exact sciences in Islam through both his original contributions to mathematics and astronomy and the observatory at Maraghah which the Mongol Khan Hülegü established for him.
Iqbal, Muhammad (1877–1938)
Authors: Hassan Riffat
Published: September 2018

Muhammad Iqbal was an outstanding poet-philosopher, perhaps the most influential Muslim thinker of the twentieth century. His philosophy, though eclectic and showing the influence of Muslims thinkers such as al-Ghazali and Rumi as well as Western thinkers such as Nietzsche and Bergson, was rooted fundamentally in the Qur’an, which Iqbal read with the sensitivity of a poet and the insight of a mystic. Iqbal’s philosophy is known as the philosophy of khudi or Selfhood. Rejecting the idea of a ‘Fall’ from Eden or original sin, Iqbal regards the advent of human beings on earth as a glorious event, since Adam was designated by God to be God’s viceregent on earth. Human beings are not mere accidents in the process of evolution. The cosmos exists in order to make possible the emergence and perfection of the Self. The purpose of life is the development of the Self, which occurs as human beings gain greater knowledge of what lies within them as well as of the external world. Iqbal’s philosophy is essentially a philosophy of action, and it is concerned primarily with motivating human beings to strive to actualize their God-given potential to the fullest degree.
Ibn Hazm, Abu Muhammad ‘Ali (994–1063)
Authors: Leaman Oliver , Albdour Salman
Published: September 2018

Ibn Hazm was the originator of a school of interpretation which based its understanding of religious texts on the apparent meaning of scriptural concepts as opposed to their hidden meaning. He argued that there is a place for reason in the understanding of scripture, but that it has to be used within the context of revelation and is severely limited in terms of what it can demonstrate. His approach is based on the idea that the language and context of religious texts are sufficient for their readers to understand them, and that there is no need to use concepts such as analogy.
‘Abduh, Muhammad (1849–1905)
Authors: Robinson Neal
Published: September 2018

The Egyptian reformer and Muslim apologist Muhammad ‘Abduh was a pupil and friend of al-Afghani. Although deeply influenced by him, ‘Abduh was less inclined to political activism and concentrated on religious, legal and educational reform. His best-known writings are a theological treatise, Risalat al-tawhid (translated into English as The Theology of Unity), and an unfinished Qur’anic commentary, Tafsir al-manar (The Manar Commentary), on which he collaborated with Rashid Rida. One of the key themes of these works is that since modernity is based on reason, Islam must be compatible with it. But ‘Abduh’s ‘modernism’ went hand in hand with returning to an idealized past, and his ‘rationalism’ was tempered by a belief in divine transcendence which limits the scope of intellectual inquiry. In ethics as in theology, he regarded the classical debates as arid and divisive, although on the issues of free will and moral law his position was in fact similar to that of the Mu‘tazila.
Mir Damad, Muhammad Baqir (d. 1631)
Authors: Dabashi Hamid
Published: September 2018

Mir Damad is primarily a gnostic philosopher, arguing that the activity of the mind makes possible the experience of spiritual visions, while visionary experience gives rise to rational thought. He brings together a variety of different traditions in Islamic philosophy, incorporating both the sort of philosophy advocated by Aristotle and its later development by the Neoplatonists, and combining them with the mystical views of Islamic thinkers. The principles of his thought are the backbone of the celebrated ‘School of Isfahan’, which developed this rich mixture of philosophical traditions even further. His approach to the analysis of being was a considerable extension to previous views on this subject, and enabled him to make important contributions to the notion of time. Mir Damad’s philosophical style is characterized by a treatment of abstract concepts behind which lies the living experience of the mystic.
Ibn Ezra, Moses ben Jacob (fl. 1055–1135)
Authors: Fenton Paul B.
Published: September 2018

Ibn Ezra was an exegete, Jewish scholar and one of the foremost Hebrew poets of medieval Spain. Although none of his systematic biblical commentaries have been preserved, two important works survive in Judaeo–Arabic prose, both dealing with biblical literary theory, rhetoric and philosophy. The literary dimension of his work makes Ibn Ezra a forerunner of modern biblical criticism. His speculative system, deeply influenced by Neplatonism, was to have a profound impact on the early Spanish Kabbalists.
Halevi, Judah (before 1075–1141)
Authors: Goodman L.E.
Published: September 2018

Physician, philosopher and perhaps the greatest Hebrew poet since the Psalms, Judah Halevi studied the Neoplatonic Aristotelianism widespread in Islamic Spain, but his loyalty to Judaic traditions, love of Israel and poetic empathy for the sufferings and aspirations of his people made him a powerful critic of that philosophical tradition. His philosophical masterpiece, the Kuzari, is a fictional dialogue set at the court of the king of the Khazars, a people of the Volga basin whose leaders had converted to Judaism in the early ninth century. Reports of the Khazar realm sparked Halevi’s imagination and gave him the backdrop for this effort to celebrate and shape his ancestral faith.

Beyond heartening his fellow Jews in times of upheaval, Halevi confronted philosophical questions that conventional thinkers often begged or ignored. He found the erudite Neoplatonism of his day too confining to God, too speculative and a priori. Tellingly, he condemns Neoplatonism for cultural vacuity, moral sterility and spiritual escapism: while Christians and Muslims, with the highest spiritual intentions, earnestly set about one another’s murder, the philosophers fail to differentiate one faith from another. What is needed, Halevi reasons, is not a still more spiritual intellectualism but a historically and geographically rooted tradition concretely directed by God’s love.

Halevi did not, as romantics often suppose, simply turn his back on reason, or on philosophy generically. Rather, he used his own philosophical gifts and poetic tact to retune philosophy to the ground notes of Jewish experience. He retained but structurally adapted the Neoplatonic linkage of God to the world via emanation, replacing the elaborate hierarchy of star souls with the simple manifestation of God’s word, the ’Amr. Like Philo’s Logos, Halevi’s ’Amr was at once an attribute of God, his wisdom and a manifestation of God immanent in nature. Since the ’Amr is an imperative, it connotes power, volition and command, not just logical entailment or necessitation. Since it is immanent, it allows fuller appropriation than was possible for many philosophers and many of the pietists and mystics in their wake, of the material side of nature, including human nature: language, material culture – including agriculture and other economic activities – law and politics belong to realm of God’s expression. Particularity is not isolated from God. Poetry and works of imagination can be expressions of the divine, not just stepchildren mediating the ever more abstract and abtruse flights of the intellect. Zion could be acknowledged as the land where the divine afflatus was most clearly articulated as a way of life. Longing for Zion need no longer be sublimated in prayer; rather, Israel’s songs of longing for the robust life of the land of God’s grace would voice a spiritual imperative that demanded practical expression and historical realization.
Nahmanides, Moses (1194–1270)
Authors: Stern Josef
Published: September 2018

One of the most influential medieval Jewish thinkers to engage with the philosophical tradition, Nahmanides was also a leading Talmudist, biblical exegete, and a founding figure of the Jewish mystical tradition (Kabbalah) that emerged in thirteenth-century Spain. Generally critical of Aristotle, he was deeply influenced by predecessors such as Moses Maimonides. As the leading rabbi in Catalonia, Nahmanides played a central role in the ‘Maimonidean controversy’ of 1232–3, a dispute that raged over the permissibility of philosophical study. He was also at the centre of the ‘Barcelona disputation’ of 1263, conducted with the apostate Pablo Christiani over the issue of philosophically motivated allegories.

Unlike his Provençal contemporaries, Nahmanides wrote neither free-standing philosophical treatises nor commentaries on Graeco-Arabic philosophical texts. Instead, he developed his original metaphysical views in sermons and his highlt influential biblical commentaries treating such topics as miracles, providence and idolatry. The commentaries proved especially influential through their thematic treatments of philosophical questions raised by the biblical text and for their suggestive expositions of mystical and theosophical ideas.
Ibn Kammuna (d. 1284)
Authors: Langermann Y. Tzvi
Published: September 2018

Physician and man of letters, Ibn Kammuna left a number of writings on philosophy and religion. His treatise comparing Judaism, Christianity and Islam caused major rioting in Baghdad, forcing him to flee that city in secret. His commentary on al-Suhrawardi’s Talwihat, the major text of Islamic Illuminationist philosophy remains one of the clearest and most thorough expositions of that branch of thought.
Ibn Falaquera, Shem Tov (1223/8–after 1290)
Authors: Jospe Raphael
Published: September 2018

A prolific author with a clear and precise Hebrew style, Ibn Falaquera wrote both original works and Hebrew translations of Arabic works of philosophy and science. His writings include encyclopedias, Bible commentaries, the first commentary on Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed and, by his own account, some twenty thousand verses of poetry. Unlike Maimonides, who wrote for the intelligentsia, Ibn Falaquera wrote most of his works with the stated aim of raising the cultural level of the Jewish people. Most of his prose works survive, many in multiple editions or manuscripts and several in European translations, a testimony to their popularity. A consistent theme in his works is the harmony of faith and reason.
Gersonides (1288–1344)
Authors: Feldman Seymour
Published: September 2018

Living all his life in southern France, Levi ben Gershom, known as Gersonides in Latin texts, was an accomplished astronomer and mathematician as well as a philosopher. A prolific and engaged exegete, Gersonides wrote biblical commentaries that are still studied today. His philosophical magnum opus, Milhamot ha-Shem (The Wars of the Lord), reached original and often unorthodox conclusions regarding many of the great issues of medieval philosophical theology. It denied creation ex nihilo, preferring a modified version of the doctrine of formatio mundi traditionally ascribed to Plato (formation of the world from pre-existing matter). It qualified traditional doctrines of divine omniscience by denying God’s determinate knowledge of future contingent events. And it confined personal immortality to the rational portion of the soul, that is, the intellect.
Albo, Joseph (c.1380–c.1444)
Authors: Frank Daniel H.
Published: September 2018

Writing in the early fifteenth century, in times of extreme urgency for Spanish Jewry, Joseph Albo presented Judaism as an axiomatic system founded on three primary principles and eight secondary ones. His Sefer ha-‘Iqqarim (Book of Principles), sought to defend Judaism against Christian attacks by laying out the basic presuppositions of the Mosaic law.

Albo’s theology belongs to a tradition of theorizing going back to Maimonides in the twelfth century. But his approach was grounded in a non-Maimonidean moral psychology. Responding to the Aristotelian intellectualism of the Maimonidean philosophy, which held true belief to be essential to human virtue and salvation, Albo focused on practice, fulfilment of the commandments. His act-centred view, grounded in the premise that beliefs cannot be commanded, allowed for a certain latitude in faith, which had both intra-communal and inter-communal advantages. If controversial doctrines such as ex nihilo creation could be made less prominent, acrimonious internal debates could be avoided, and the community could be somewhat less exposed to external attack.
Arama, Isaac ben Moses (c.1420–94)
Authors: Stern Josef
Published: September 2018

Like many of his fifteenth-century Spanish contemporaries, Arama opposed the Aristotelianism of Maimonides. His philosophical sermons and biblical commentaries attack Jewish Aristotelians on charges of subordinating revelation to reasoning, upholding an eternal universe whose necessity limits God’s power, and excluding miracles and individual providence. Yet while stressing the fallibility of human reason, Arama is no fideist. An eclectic, he values reason and philosophy as ways of deepening the understanding of Scripture through allegorical interpretation. He also develops striking philosophical theories of miracles, providence and the fundamentals of faith.
Messer Leon, Judah (c.1425–c.1495)
Authors: Tirosh-Samuelson Hava
Published: September 2018

Messer Leon was a philosopher, physician, jurist, communal leader, poet and orator. Ordained as a rabbi by 1450, Messer Leon was qualified to adjudicate legal cases among Jews and head an academy (yeshivah) for advanced studies in Jewish law. He also came close to embodying the Renaissance ideal of uomo universale. His learning was formally recognized in 1469, when Emperor Frederick III awarded him a doctorate in medicine and philosophy and granted him the unusual privilege of conferring doctoral degrees in those subjects on Jewish students.

Messer Leon’s contribution to Jewish philosophy was in the field of logic, the art considered by him to be the key to the proper harmonization of religion and philosophy. He regarded scholastic logic to be superior to Arabic logic and wrote supercommentaries on Averroes’ logical works as well as an encyclopedia of logic, Mikhlal Yofi (Purest Beauty), in an attempt to shift Jewish philosophical education from the Judaeo-Arabic logical tradition to scholastic logic. Although his encyclopedia became a popular textbook, Messer Leon failed to mould the culture of Italian Jewry as he had intended. In particular, he could not curb the spread of Kabbalah, a tradition which he vehemently opposed because of its underlying Platonic metaphysics.

Most importantly, Messer Leon composed the first manual of Hebrew rhetoric, entitled Nofet Tzufim (The Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow). Printed in 1476, this Jewish response to Latin humanism combines the Averroist-Aristotelianism tradition and the Ciceronian-Quintilian one. The appropriation of humanistic rhetoric was given a Jewish meaning when Messer Leon claimed that the Torah, rather than the writings of the pagan, classical orators, exemplified perfect speech because it was a revelation of perfect divine wisdom. By analysing Scripture from the perspective of classical rhetoric, Messer Leon legitimized the study of ancient pagan and Christian orators even as he argued for the supremacy of biblical rhetoric over all merely human eloquence.
Mendelssohn, Moses (1729–86)
Authors: Arkush Allan
Published: September 2018

A Jewish disciple of Leibniz and Wolff, Mendelssohn strove throughout his life to uphold and strengthen their rationalist metaphysics while sustaining his ancestral religion. His most important philosophic task, as he saw it, was to refine and render more persuasive the philosophical proofs for the existence of God, providence and immortality. His major divergence from Leibniz was in stressing that ‘the best of all possible worlds’, which God had created, was in fact more hospitable to human beings than Leibniz had supposed. Towards the end of his life, the irrationalism of Jacobi and the critical philosophy of Kant shook Mendelssohn’s faith in the demonstrability of the fundamental metaphysical precepts, but not his confidence in their truth. They would have to be sustained by ‘common sense’, he reasoned, until future philosophers succeeded in restoring metaphysics to its former glory. While accepting Wolff’s teleological understanding of human nature and natural law, Mendelssohn placed far greater value on human freedom and outlined a political philosophy that protected liberty of conscience. His philosophic defence of his own religion stressed that Judaism is not a ‘revealed religion’ demanding acceptance of particular dogmas but a ‘revealed legislation’ requiring the performance of particular actions. The object of this divine and still valid legislation, he suggested, was often to counteract forces that might otherwise subvert the natural religion entrusted to us by reason. To resolve the tension between his own political liberalism and the Bible’s endorsement of religious coercion, Mendelssohn argued that contemporary Judaism, at any rate, no longer acknowledges any person’s authority to compel others to perform religious acts.
Jewish philosophy in the early 19th century
Authors: Seeskin Kenneth
Published: September 2018

Although Jewish philosophy flourished in the Middle Ages, it underwent a serious decline in 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Spain. The period following Kant and Mendelssohn witnessed an attempt to reintegrate Jewish philosophy into the mainstream of Western culture. The strategy of reintegration consisted of two elements: (1) showing that there is more to Judaism than the study of Scripture and (2) arguing that some of the ideas that won favour in the Enlightenment were anticipated by Jews centuries earlier.

The most central idea that Jewish thinkers claimed as their own is a shift in focus from theoretical issues to practical ones. As important features of the medieval worldview fell into disrepute, many philosophers began to ask whether there are limits to what human reason can know. Can it really prove that God exists or that the soul is immortal? One response was to argue that even if no proof can be found, there are still grounds for believing, particularly if our understanding of ourselves as moral agents makes no sense without them.

But it did not take long for people to argue that moral agency requires not just a God but a free and transcendent God capable of issuing commands to free agents created in the divine image. Here too, Jewish thinkers claimed that the idea of a God who is not limited by nature and insists on mercy and justice for all people was an integral part of monotheism as understood by the Hebrew prophets.
Baumgardt, David (1890–1963)
Authors: Levy Zeev
Published: September 2018

Baumgardt’s early works dealt with the problem of modalities in the philosophies of Kant, Husserl and Meinong and with German philosophical romanticism, especially in the mystic Franz von Baader. Although he never engaged in systematic inquiry into Judaism or Jewish philosophy, he was fascinated by the Jewish religious legacy, and his philosophical reflections on Jewish issues were integral to his philosophical work. A secular Jew, he associated himself with the liberal trends within Judaism. The Jewish philosophers he most highly prized were Maimonides, Spinoza and Mendelssohn. The chief goal of his Jewish studies was to promote those beliefs in Judaism that are of ethical significance and to draw out the import of the moral demands found scattered throughout the ancient Jewish Scriptures. Baumgardt’s concern with ethics grew with his increasingly critical stance towards traditional religion. In that vein, he laid great stress on the distinction between knowledge and belief and on that between Jewish rituals and their underlying meaning.
Fackenheim, Emil Ludwig (1916–2003)
Authors: Morgan Michael L.
Published: September 2018

Fackenheim is best known for his account of authentic philosophical and Jewish responses to the Nazi Holocaust. Fackenheim’s thought, indebted to German philosophy, always had a practical, existential purpose. He aimed, consistently, to show how philosophical and theological thought could pay attention to lived experience in order to gain the understanding it sought. In this way, he exposed the varied ways in which thought and life, ideas and history, are interdependent. Philosophical and religious thought are grounded in historical experience and give direction to that experience; life is the ground of reflection and derives its meaning from it.
Karaism
Authors: Frank Daniel
Published: September 2018

The Karaites (qara’im, or benei miqra) take their name from the Hebrew word for Scripture. The sect’s scripturalism originated in its rejection of the ‘Oral Law’ embodied in rabbinic literature. Like earlier scripturalist groups – notably the Sadducees – Karaites sought to derive their practices directly from the biblical text. While Karaism is usually traced to mid-eighth-century Iraq, the early history remains murky. The sect crystallized in the Islamic East during the late ninth and early tenth centuries, calling forth stern reactions from the leaders of mainstream rabbinic Judaism. Although harsh at times, the ensuing polemics stimulated both Karaite and Rabbanite scholarship in the fields of biblical exegesis, Hebrew grammar and lexicography, jurisprudence and religious philosophy. The two groups differed sharply over points of law and practice – the calendar, dietary laws, Sabbath regulations – but typically concurred on questions of theology.
Zionism
Authors: Levy Zeev
Published: September 2018

Zionism, the idea of Jewish nationality in its modern form, emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century, several decades after nationalism had taken hold among most European peoples. The term denotes the ideology as well as the movement(s) whose goal is re-establishment of the Jewish people as a nation in its homeland in Palestine. Unlike many other movements of national liberation, Zionism seeks not the removal of a colonial regime but the return of a people to its land. The most ancient roots of this aspiration were religious, but many forms of modern Zionism shed the messianic and eschatological elements of the two-thousand-year-old hope in favour of more immediate political and social aims that were often philosophically shaped.
Anti-Semitism
Authors: Leaman Oliver , Nyman Clive
Published: September 2018

Anti-Semitism is a form of racism which sees Jews as a dangerous and despicable group in society. It has solid philosophical sources in the work of German Idealism which emphasized the distinctiveness of Judaism and how it has been superseded by Christianity. Both Kant and Hegel made a sharp distinction between Judaism and what they regarded as more rational religions, and they questioned the capability of the Jewish people for playing an integral role in the state. Sartre used the notion of anti-Semitism to show how a sense of self-identity is created by the attitudes of others towards the individual and the group. That is, what makes Jews Jews is the fact that there is anti-Semitism, and there is nothing that Jews can do about anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is a problem for the anti-Semites themselves; anti-Semitism, by Sartre’s account, is in fact an attempted solution to the difficulties of taking free and authentic decisions. Anti-Semitism has played an important role in Jews’ self-definition, in attitudes to the State of Israel and to the religion of Judaism itself.
Bioethics, Jewish
Authors: Zohar Noam J.
Published: September 2018

Jewish bioethics seeks to apply Jewish modes of normative discourse in bioethics. For some moral issues in medicine, explicit guidance may be found in the traditional sources of halakhah; but many others require creative application of ancient or medieval precedents and norms. Much of the contemporary writing in this area takes the classical form of rabbinic Responsa to specific queries from adherents of the halakhah. But the field also includes contributions from thinkers who offer not rulings on religious law but the fruits of moral inspiration by the tradition.

In the Judaic tradition the idea that each human being is created in God’s image fosters a powerful commitment to saving and prolonging life. Murder and suicide are terrible sacrileges. Procreation is highly valued. Contraception is not easily countenanced, and still less is abortion. But abortion is clearly distinguished from homicide.

The symbolic preciousness of the divine image disallows disfigurement of human corpses. The implications of this prohibition for pathology and for the study of anatomy are hotly disputed. The prohibition is overridden, however, in cases of immediate life-saving.

Regarding triage and resource allocation, the universal egalitarianism implied by the idea of God’s image fosters a powerful reluctance against bringing about any person’s death, even to save a number of lives. Some tension arises between this egalitarianism and traditional structures of social and religious hierarchy.
Creation and conservation, religious doctrine of
Authors: Hasker William
Published: September 2018

The doctrine of the creation of the universe by God is common to the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; reflection on creation has been most extensively developed within the Christian tradition. Creation is by a single supreme God, not a group of deities, and is an ‘absolute’ creation (creation ex nihilo, ‘out of nothing’) rather than being either a ‘making’ out of previously existing material or an ‘emanation’ (outflow) from God’s own nature. Creation, furthermore, is a free act on God’s part; he has no ‘need’ to create but has done so out of love and generosity. He not only created the universe ‘in the beginning’, but he sustains (‘conserves’) it by his power at each moment of its existence; without God’s support it would instantly collapse into nothingness. It is controversial whether the belief in divine creation receives support from contemporary cosmology, as seen in the ‘Big Bang’ theory.