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Having done what I could in my earlier lectures to break the edge of the intellectualistic reductiones ad absurdum, I must leave the issue in your hands. Whatever I may say, each of you will be sure to take pluralism or leave it, just as your own sense of rationality moves and inclines. The only thing I emphatically insist upon is that it is a fully co-ordinate hypothesis with monism.
In this discussion also Crescas takes issue with the intellectualistic point of view of Maimonides and particularly Gersonides.
The two directions in which this naturalism expresses itself, the mechanical view of the world, which endeavors to understand the universe from the standpoint of nature and all becoming from the standpoint of motion, and the intellectualistic view, which seeks to understand the mind from the standpoint of knowledge, are most intimately connected.
Pluralistic empiricists, on the other hand, have remained in the world of sense, either naïvely and because they overlooked the intellectualistic contradictions, or because, not able to ignore them, they thought they could refute them by a superior use of the same intellectualistic logic. Thus it is that John Mill pretends to refute the Achilles-tortoise fallacy.
But Judah Halevi's nationalism and the expression of his poetical and religious feelings and ideas could not vie with the dominating personality of Maimonides, whose rationalistic and intellectualistic attitude swept everything before it and became the dominant mode of thinking for his own and succeeding ages.
Maimonides's ethics as well as his interpretation of the Pentateuchal laws is intellectualistic, as the foregoing account shows. And it is natural that it should be. The prevailing trend of thought in the middle ages, alike among the Arabs, Jews and Christians, was of this character. Aristotle was the master of science, and to him intellectual contemplation is the highest good of man.
Every abstract concept as such excludes what it doesn't include, and if such concepts are adequate substitutes for reality's concrete pulses, the latter must square themselves with intellectualistic logic, and no one of them in any sense can claim to be its own other.
This conception, which may be characterized as intellectualistic in its content, presents itself on its formal side as a quantitative way of looking at the world, which sacrifices all qualitative antitheses in order to arrange the totality of being and becoming in a single series with no distinctions but those of degree.
Men who are strongly of the fact-loving temperament, you may remember me to have said, are liable to be kept at a distance by the small sympathy with facts which that philosophy from the present-day fashion of idealism offers them. It is far too intellectualistic.
Intellectualistic critics of sensation insist that sensations are disjoined only. Later, both terms and relations get universalized by being conceptualized and named.
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