Scholasticism After Thomas Aquinas and the Teachings of Hasdai Crescas and His Predecessors by Shlomo Pines, and: The Teachings of Maimonides ed. by Abraham Cohen (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 169 Scholasticism After Thomas Aquinas and the Teachings of Hasdai Crescas and His Predecessors. By SHLOMO PINES. Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1967. Pp. 101. The Teachings of Maimonides. Ed. by ABRAHAM CoHEN. Prolegomemon by Marvin Fox. New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1968. Pp. 389. $8.95. Professor Shlomo Pines of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who a few years ago produced the definitive English translation of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, presents now an original thesis which opens wide possibilities for further research. While historians of medieval philosophy have traditionally emphasized the influence of Arabian philosophers on Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides, and the influence of both sources on Aquinas and other Christian scholastics, Pines's present essay explores evidence of influence exercised by later Christian scholastics on their Jewish contemporaries. Using ample textual comparisons, Pines suggests several points of affinity between post-Thomistic scholasticism (Scotism in particular} and the theories of such Jewish thinkers as Yeda'aya ha-Penini Bedersi, Gersonides, Joseph ibn Caspi, and Hasdai Crescas. The instances of relationship includes Bedersi's doctrine of personal forms, which resembles Scotus's haecceitas; the discussions by Gersonides and ibn Caspi concerning God's knowledge of future contingencies, which strongly recall the Christian scholastic debates on the same subject; and the criticisms levelled by Crescas at the Aristotelian foundations of Maimonides' proofs for the existence of God, which parallel somewhat the objections against the Thomistic proofs from Christian adherents of the " new physics." Observing that fourteenth and fifteenth-century scholasticism itself still remains to be investigated in much more depth, Pines concludes with the remark that any advance in this field of research is likely to shed light on the Jewish philosophy of the same period. The Teachings of Maimonides is a KTAV republication of a volume which first appeared in 1927. Its author and editor, Dr. Abraham Cohen, was a scholar who won considerable recognition for his work as general editor of the Soncino Books of the Bible, his contributions to the Soncino English edition of the Babylonian Talmud, and his own book, Everyman's Talmud. In this volume he proposed to present an orderly compendium of Maimonides' views on religious and philosophical subjects. Since Maimonides himself never gave a systematic exposition of his entire thought in any single treatise, Cohen's undertaking was designed to introduce the essentials of Maimonidean teaching to a wide range of readers who would lack the ability or patience to struggle through the medieval thinker's vast and labyrinthine writings. Selected passages from these writings comprise almost the entire contents of the volume, so that Maimonides is allowed 170 BOOK REVIEWS to speak for himself except for transitional paragraphs and abundant explanatory footnotes supplied by Cohen. For the bulk of the volume the arrangement of materials follows the order of Maimonides' "Thirteen Principles of Faith," covering the existence and nature of God, the structure of the universe, religion and revelation , providence, reward and punishment, and eschatology. There follows a section on "Psychology," stressing the nature and functions of the human intellect, and then a section on " Ethics," by far the longest in the book (forty-eight pages), covering the classification of virtues and vices, the virtuous mean, asceticism, the requisites for physical health as well as for moral and social well-being, and the goal of human life. Under each of these subject headings Cohen's procedure is to assemble excerpts from widely scattered writings of Maimonides in such a way as to suggest a clear, coherent and consistent teaching. In terms of the purpose which Cohen set for it, the anthology is certainly a contribution. It can serve to introduce unfamiliar readers to many important elements of Maimonides' thought, and in so doing it incidentally makes available passages from several of his works which still have not been published in English translation. Any compendium of this kind runs the obvious risk of oversimplifying and misrepresenting an author's thought by selecting passages from different works out of their respective contexts and thus giving more of an impression of consistency and continuity than is warranted. As Professor Marvin Cox of Ohio State University observes in his introduction...