Chapter 25 - Philosophy

Summary

In the history of Judaism during the Late Middle Ages, and particularly in the medieval Christian world, philosophy played an important role, even greater than it previously had in the Arab-Islamic world. A number of Jewish authors wrote works about themes that can be included within philosophy proper in the modern sense of the term. These works deal with logic, physics, psychology and metaphysics; ethical themes were less frequently studied, since the Jewish public preferred the traditional religious Jewish ethical law to the philosophical ethics as found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and in its medieval interpretations. Surprisingly, many of those works have been ignored or only partially studied by scholars, at least until the last decades of the twentieth century. Only recently, some useful books and articles about them have been published, and specific historical facts have been examined in detail. A tentative overview of these facts will be given here, and a general conclusion about the nature of Jewish philosophy in medieval Christian world will be suggested.