Maimonides [addendum]

Since Shlomo Pines's entry, scholars have come to accept 1138, not 1135, as the year of Maimonides' birth. Some scholars also believe that the youthful treatise on logic (Millot ha-Higayon) is not by Maimonides. The major development in Maimonidean studies, however, is an interpretive one. Pines worked closely with Leo Strauss on the 1963 English translation of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, which remains the best complete English version of his philosophical magnum opus. Strauss, who wrote the introductory essay to the translation, had an idiosyncratic way of reading many premodern thinkers, including Maimonides. In brief, Strauss understood Maimonides to be engaged in a vast project of deception, of concealing his real beliefs, in order that those incapable of understanding and accepting them not become perplexed and dislodged from their simple pieties.

Strauss's way of reading Maimonides finds its way into this article when Pines suggests that Maimonides was a closet Aristotelian who (really) believed in the eternity of the world. Never mind that Maimonides says the opposite to this; for the Straussian, this is just the point: to conceal one's real beliefs, and to suggest the opposite from what one explicitly argues for. There are still Straussian interpreters and interpretations, but they are in retreat. Philosophical scholars tend to rest content with mulling over the actual arguments that Maimonides presents. Further, in response to the Straussian position that there exists a deep divide between philosophy and the law (religion), between Athens and Jerusalem, recent scholars such as Isadore Twersky (1967) and David Hartman (1976) argue that, on the contrary, Maimonides grounds philosophy in the law and understands the law as subserving in large part suprapolitical ends.

Scholars seem less taken with the Maimonidean reaction to Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) than Pines appears to be. The Islamic thinkers who have more recently emerged as significant for Maimonides are al-Fārābī and Ibn Bājja (Avempace). They tend to be important for their influence on Maimonides' moral and political theorizing. Pines is still good on Maimonides' practical philosophy. Especially to be noted is his insistence on a Platonic element in his view of the summum bonum. Often Maimonides is presented as endorsing Aristotle's view that human happiness is a function of contemplative activity alone. Pines rightly resists this, noting that Moses, the political prophet, is paradigmatic for Maimonides. Indeed, the end of the Guide makes clear that imitation of God mirrors God's providential care for the created world.

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This is the complete article, containing 829 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page).