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Updated: June 10, 2025
This is due principally to the fact that Aaron ben Elijah endeavors to defend the Mutakallimun against Maimonides's charge that they were influenced by preconceived notions and allowed their religious views to dictate to them their interpretation of nature, instead of letting the latter speak for itself.
The Karaites before Maimonides adopted the atomic theory without question. And Aaron ben Elijah, who had Maimonides's "Guide" before him, was nevertheless sufficiently loyal to his Karaite predecessors to discuss their views side by side with those of the Aristotelians and to defend them against the strictures of Maimonides.
The book of Job is to Maimonides a treatise on Providence, and the five characters in the drama represent the various opinions on the nature of Providence as they were held by different schools of philosophy and theology in Maimonides's day. Job has the Aristotelian view that God cares nothing for man.
The second proof of God's existence, unity and incorporeality, that based upon the distinction between "possible" and "necessary" existent, which has its origin in Alfarabi and Avicenna, is also found in Ibn Daud. The other two proofs are Maimonides's own, i. e., they are not found in the works of his Jewish predecessors.
In certain things our scholars followed the theory and the method of these Muʿtazila." Thanks to the researches of modern Jewish and non-Jewish scholars we know now that the Rabbanite thinker Saadia and the Karaite writers, like Joseph Al Basir and Jeshuah ben Judah, are indebted far more to the Mohammedan Muʿtazilites than would appear from Maimonides's statement just quoted.
And so Gersonides proceeds to demolish Maimonides's position by reducing it ad absurdum. What does Maimonides mean by saying that God knows the contingent? If he means that God knows that the contingent may as contingent happen otherwise than as he knows it will happen, we do not call this in us knowledge, but opinion.
Maimonides's treatment of the Bible texts and their application to his philosophical disquisitions is so much more comprehensive and masterly than anything in the same line done before him, that it made everything else superfluous and set the pace for manifold imitation by the successors of Maimonides, small and great.
But it is really no stranger than the maintenance of the soul's materiality equally defended by other religionists, like Tertullian for example, and the opposition to Maimonides's spiritualism on the part of Abraham ben David of Posquières.
Having made clear Maimonides's chief interest and purpose in his masterpiece we need not follow his own method of treatment, which often gives the impression of a studied attempt to conceal his innermost ideas from all but the initiated.
The main problem, therefore, of Jewish philosophy is not touched upon in Israeli's works, and no wonder Maimonides had no use for them. For the purely scientific questions treated by Israeli could in Maimonides's day be studied to much better advantage in the works of the great Arabian Aristotelians, Al Farabi and Avicenna, compared to whom Israeli was mediocre.
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