Maimonides on the Knowability of the Heavens and of Their Mover (Guide 2:24)

Editor’s Introduction to the Forum

A sentence from Maimonides’ Guide 2:24 haunts Maimonidean scholarship. Its understanding is intimately bound up with one’s appreciation of the very nature and aims of Maimonides’ philosophical project. This is why the correct understanding of this sentence has stirred heated controversies.¹ It seemed appropriate to initiate a discussion of all the issues involved: this is the purpose of the present Aleph Forum.

The history of the scholarly understanding of the sentence in question can be briefly recapitulated as follows.² The Arabic original of the sentence, as seems to be found in all the manuscripts of Dalālat al-Ḥāʾirīn, is:

Pines translates this sentence as follows:

For it is impossible for us to accede to the points starting from which conclusions may be drawn about the heavens; for the latter are too far away from us and too high in place and in rank. And even the general conclusion that may be drawn from them, namely that they prove the existence of their Mover, is a matter the knowledge of which cannot be reached by human intellects.⁴

Similar translations were proposed by Judah al-Ḥarizi and Salomon Munk.⁵

But many readers of the Guide (in its Arabic original), beginning with Samuel Ibn Tibbon, were of the opinion that this text flatly contradicts what Maimonides said elsewhere⁶ and therefore cannot possibly express his thought. This tradition begins with a gloss that Ibn Tibbon added to his translation of the Guide:

Said Samuel Ibn Tibbon: It seems to me that something is missing here, whose sense is “but other things pertaining to them is a matter. ...” For it is inconceivable that he [Maimonides] would say of the proof [reʾayah] of the Mover [of the heavens] from their motion that it is unknowable [lit. cannot be apprehended]. For he drew on it as an [apodictic] demonstration [mofet] or as a strong proof [reʾayah ḥazaqah] in numerous places.

Samuel Ibn Tibbon consequently suggests that Maimonides’ intended meaning is expressed by the following text (added words are in italics):

For it is impossible for us to accede to the points starting from which conclusions may be drawn about the heavens; for the latter are too far away from us and too high in place and in rank. The general conclusion that may be drawn from them is that they indicate the existence of their Mover, but other things pertaining to them are a matter the knowledge of which cannot be reached by human intellects.

Samuel Ibn Tibbon put his conjectured emendation in a marginal note, but copyists soon incorporated it into the text of his Hebrew translation of the Guide. Consequently, whereas the Arabic text of the Guide, followed by the major translators (al-Ḥarizi, Munk, Pines), states that the “existence of the Mover [of the Heavens] is a matter the knowledge of which cannot be reached by human intellects,” the standard editions of Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew translation state just the opposite.

Many scholars accepted Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s understanding of the text: some simply because they knew the Guide only via the Hebrew translation, others because they took the Hebrew to reflect a better textual tradition and/or to have been endorsed by Maimonides himself, and also (with Ibn Tibbon) that only the emended reading is consistent with Maimonides’ general philosophy. Other scholars, on the contrary, took the Arabic text to be authentic and to be consistent with Maimonides’ global philosophy.

An intermediate view was offered by R. Joseph Qafaḥ:

Where most readers read la-amr, Qafaḥ read li-amr, thereby obtaining an understanding of the sentence summarized by Davidson as follows:

Instead of having Maimonides say that the general proof from the heavens, namely, that they prove to us the existence of their mover, is something the knowledge of which cannot be attained by human intellect, Kafah’s translation has him say: “The general making of an inference from the heavens is that they prove to us [or show...