Chapter 1 - The Structure and Purpose of the Guide

Summary

In delineating the causes or reasons for a thing’s being, Aristotle notes, “what something is and what it is for are one …” (Aristotle 1984, 198a25–6). The nature and structure of a thing and its purpose coincide. The nature and structure of a table is what it is for. The nature and structure of the heart is no different than its purpose, to pump blood. And so it is, as I shall argue, with Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed (c. 1190). The structure of the work is intimately related to its purpose and ultimate goal. That there is an overall structure needs to be unpacked, and that the structure, overall and even within its discrete parts, serves a particular end also needs to be clarified. If this programmatic essay succeeds, it will provide a framework for reading the essays that follow. Each essay may be read as offering insight to the specific issue at hand, but also may be read as, in its own way, aiming at the ultimate purpose of the work as a whole.