How should we live? This question lies at the core of what it means to be human. In volume II we explore the “best which has been thought and said” from the middle ages through the early renaissance. Today’s session is on Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed.

Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (1135-1204), or Maimonides, is one of the great religious geniuses of Judaism. (His work the Mishneh Torah, is still an authoritative reference for Talmudic interpretation.) He came up in the distinctive culture of the Islamic West (North Africa and Spain), having been born in Cordoba. The Guide of the Perplexed (written in Arabic around 1190) is his attempt to harmonize Aristotle with the Hebrew Bible. A pious Jew, as al-Ghazali was a pious Muslim, Maimonides (a contemporary of the philosopher Averroes) differs from al-Ghazali in holding to the compatibility of faith and philosophy. His work influenced Aquinas.