Moses Maimonides and His Time (review)

152 SHOFAR Mittleman speaks of Breuer suspended between Kant and Kabbalah, between reason and faith, between culture and Torah. His visions of Israel's metahistorical dimensions gave expression to visions of Israel's vocation,a reality that transforms and transfigures nature and history. This is the plan of redemption. The contradictions that we find in Breuer'swork are a weakness for some and a strength for others. In contradiction the great works of human creativity are born, in the systematic schemes to eliminate contradiction we find that suffocating monism that shuts off challenge and opposition. The deeper the contradiction, the more fascinating the conquests made by the human spirit; the deeper the fascination, the more we fathom the depths of the spirit that embodies the divine breath. This book shows with fascinating clarity the implications of Breuer's consistent and challenging confrontation with Kant's philosophy, how in opposition to it there emerged a serious and meaningful grasp of the Sinaitic revelation as the source of all thinking that attempts to avoid the chaos that emerges from an exaggerated effort to make man the center of the universe. Revelation is a clear and decisive challenge to the rational universe· that Descartes, Spinoza, and the Enlightenment had given to Western European civilization. The confrontation is always with Kant and Hegel. The poet Heine recognized this clearly when he noted that German Idealism sought to destroy Christianity, and with this destruction it brought back the gods of the Valhalla. Mittleman has done us a service by pointing the way to thinkers we must recognize, ponder, and translate. William Kluback Resident Professor of Philosophy City University of New York Moses Maimonides and His Time, edited by Eric L. Ormsby. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989. 180 pp. $19.95. This collection of essays provides a good introduction to some fundamental aspects of Maimonides' philosophy. All contributions are concerned in various ways with understanding his thinking in its historical context. The first two papers attempt to throw light on Maimonides' life, while the remaining seven papers pay special attention to the Aristotelian, Christian, and Arabic background of his philosophical thinking. The result is a well integrated and well balanced historical account of this extraordinary thinker. Norman Roth in "The Jews in Spain at the Time of Maimonides" (pp. 1-20) and Mark C. Cohen in "Maimonides' Egypt" (pp. 21-34) investigate Volume 9, No.3 Spring 1991 153 the broader cultural and historical developments of Maimonides' time, and they show convincingly that Maimonides, while continuing to "show his love for his Spanish homeland and heritage" (p. 20), did not remain a stranger in Egypt but "ultimately became a true son of Egypt" (p. 32). He did not "withdraw from society," but actively addressed "the needs of the Jews of his new homeland" .(p. 32). Arthur Hyman's "Demonstrative, Dialectical and Sophistic Arguments in the Philosophy of Moses Maimonides" (pp. 35-52), Joel L. Kraemer's "Maimonides on Aristotle and Scientific Method" (pp. 58-88), and Daniel H. Frank, "Humility as a Virtue: A Maimonidean Critique of Aristotle's Ethics" (pp 89-100) are concerned with a discussion of Maimonides' debts to Aristotle. They show how he developed and adapted some Aristotelian themes in his own theory. Hyman and Kraemer make a case for the central importance of dialectical arguments in Maimonides. For Aristotle, dialectical arguments are different from demonstrative arguments which are intended to provide us with scientific knowledge and from sophistical arguments which are based upon deceptive premises because they "seek plausible answers to genuine and significant questions for which no demonstrative answers exist" (p. 38). The authors show that both Aristotle and Maimonides consider such arguments important for the solution of physical and metaphysical problems , and argue that they possess cognitive significance. In this way, the Guide of the Perplexed emerges as "a work that is mainly dialectical" (p. 88). While Hyman and Kraemer emphasize the continuities between Aristotle and Maimonides, Frank points out one important discontinuity: Maimonides "radically alters the Aristotelian concept of humility. Aristotle's vice becomes Maimonides' outstanding virtue" (p. 98). This radical difference is traced by Frank to the theocentric character of Maimonides' ethics. The...