Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 164 - Man and Superman - Gersonides and the Jewish Reaction to Averroes.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich and King's College London, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode? Man and Superman. Gersonides and the Jewish Reaction to Iverroes. If you want to bring the ideas of a long-dead philosopher to a wider audience, you have three basic choices, not counting podcasts. You can translate the philosopher's writings into a new language. You can produce writings of your own that present the philosopher's ideas, perhaps applying them to new problems to show the philosopher's perennial relevance. Or you can write commentaries. These methods were practiced already in the ancient world. Let's hear it for Boethius in particular, who did all three of these things for Aristotle. And they are still practiced today. We've also seen translations, independent treatises, and commentaries among philosophical authors writing in Arabic. Now that we've arrived at philosophy in Hebrew, there's a fourth approach to consider. Not podcasts or interpretive dance, though that would be pretty awesome, but rather the super commentary. A super commentary is not a commentary that comes from the planet Krypton or has been bitten by a radioactive spider. It's something more mundane. A commentary about another commentary. As we know, the commentaries of Iverroes had a great impact on Christian philosophers when they were translated into Latin, and on Jewish philosophers when translated into Hebrew. Among the Christians, Iverroes was simply the commentator. And among the Jews, one scholar in particular deserves the title of the super commentator, Levi Ben Gerson, usually known as Gersonides, or alternatively Ralbag, an honorific that abbreviates Rabbi Levi Ben Gerson, just as Maimonides is known as Rambam. When it came to understanding Aristotle, Iverroes was the man, and that would make Gersonides Superman. He didn't hail from Krypton, even though Ralbag would be a pretty decent name for a comic book space alien. Rather he lived in Provence in southern France, where he may have worked as a money lender alongside his philosophical and religious scholarly activities. I'm not sure how well the money lending business treated him, but those scholarly activities definitely paid dividends. In addition to his super commentaries on Iverroes, he produced commentaries on books of the Bible, treatises on mathematics, and one of the greatest treatises of medieval Jewish thought, the Milhamot HaShem, or Wars of the Lord, which brings together the richness of the Aristotelian tradition with the ideas of Maimonides in an effort to show that there is no contradiction between philosophy and faith. A particularly impressive aspect of his writing is his contribution to astronomy, in honor of which a crater on the moon has been named Rabbi Levi. See, I told you he could be from outer space. Now you might be imagining that Gersonides's commentaries on Iverroes were unfeasibly enormous. After all, I told you when talking about Iverroes that his line-by-line so-called long commentaries were very long indeed. How huge would a commentary on such a commentary be? But Gersonides focused on the epitomes and paraphrases of Iverroes, the texts misleadingly called short and middle commentaries. He seems to have been especially interested in logic and psychology. For instance, he wrote super commentaries on Iverroes's epitomes of the three first works in the Organon, or Aristotelian logical writings. Incidentally, these super commentaries were later translated into Latin, just as Iverroes was. These exegetical works of Gersonides represent the high-water mark of response to Iverroes among Jews. He lived in the first half of the 14th century, dying in 1344, which meant that he had access to the fruits of the Hebrew translation movement I've mentioned in previous episodes. Across Europe, the commentaries of Iverroes were attracting intense attention. For instance, Hebrew versions of the logical paraphrases were produced by three separate translators in Naples and in southern France. We can get an impression of Iverroes's impact not only from Gersonides, but from a range of other figures. Let's take, as an example, Shem Tov ben Joseph Falakera, who probably lived in Andalusia and died at the end of the 13th century. He wrote a lovely little treatise in Hebrew called the Epistle of the Debate, which adapts the ideas of Iverroes's decisive treatise for a Jewish audience. In it, Falakera imagines a debate between a philosophically-minded Jew and a religious scholar who thinks that Jews have no business reading Aristotle and Iverroes. The defender of philosophy does not try to insist that everything philosophers have said can be reconciled with Judaism. Instead, he compares himself to someone eating the fruit of a pomegranate and discarding the peel, or taking honey from bees. In particular, we should discard the philosophers' denial of miracles, though this can be excused since they did not have the benefit of a tradition relating the miracle stories. And on the point that matters most, philosophers agree with the Jewish faith when they argue that the world is produced by a single creator. The religious scholar retorts that there is no need to argue for this at all since it is stated clearly in Revelation. Here's where Falakera's Iverroism starts to show. He has his proponent of philosophy say that, without rational proof, religious beliefs are only being accepted blindly by authority. To believe on the basis of philosophical proof is like seeing something with your own eyes rather than relying on the testimony of others. Indeed, the religious scholar himself, for all his learning, is no better than the common ignoramus who mouths the teachings of Judaism without a proper understanding of what he says. Of course, this is in full agreement with the message of Iverroes's decisive treatise, and even the tactics deployed by Falakera's protagonist are reminiscent of Iverroes. You might remember that Iverroes was writing a legal treatise, so he based himself on Quranic quotations and gave arguments that were directed squarely at fellow jurists. Falakera's Epistle of the Debate is not a legal document, like Iverroes's treatise was, but he too cites scripture in support of philosophy. For instance, from Deuteronomy, And like Iverroes, he argues dialectically, trying to hit anti-philosophy legal scholars where it hurts. Not only does he suggest that such a scholar has no better status than your average Jew, but he draws a comparison between reaching philosophical understanding and using reason to extrapolate from rabbinic texts to lay down new legal judgments. If Falakera's Epistle shows that Iverroes found an eager reception among Jews, it also shows that the Hebrew philosophical movement he helped inspire was hotly debated. You don't write a dialogue like that if there are no real opponents of philosophy to be won over. As we saw last time, even Maimonides sparked both metaphorical and literal fires of controversy. If this great Jewish legal mind could rouse such opposition, what would the community make of non-Jews with problematic teachings, like Aristotle and Iverroes? Enter Gersonides. As an expert on Jewish law, or halakhah, he was well placed to judge Aristotle's compatibility with the Torah. And as an expert mathematician and astronomer, he was in a good position to pass judgment on the epistemology and science that came down through the Aristotelian tradition. Following the lead of Maimonides, he did not take the philosopher's word for anything, but passed judgments on their arguments and suggested improvements where needed. The title of his chief philosophical work refers to this task. Using the language of the Bible, he says that he is fighting the wars of the Lord by overturning the mistakes of philosophical predecessors. If Gersonides hoped to silence once and for all the debate about philosophy, he was not successful. One later critic sarcastically referred to his treatise as the wars against the Lord. But certainly no one could ever accuse Gersonides of uncritically following his philosophical authorities. Anyone who reads the wars of the Lord will immediately be struck by his exhaustive listing of all the arguments on each topic he tackles. He then suggests problems with each of the positions he has listed, only then declaring his own position. This approach may be inspired by Averroes's commentaries. Averroes, himself adopting the policy of late ancient commentators, would frequently explain all the previous interpretations of a given passage in Aristotle before setting out his own reading. A case in point would be Averroes's notorious discussions of intellect in his three works of exegesis devoted to Aristotle's On the Soul. Reading those commentaries, one can learn not only what Averroes thinks Aristotle meant, but also what other commentators, ranging from Alexander to Ibn Bajja, had said. The wars of the Lord goes this one better by summarizing many of the same views on the intellect and throwing Averroes's own position into the mix. Actually, Gersonides was not able to read Averroes's full or long commentary to On the Soul since it hadn't yet been translated into Hebrew. But thanks to comments Averroes himself added to his earlier epitome of On the Soul, Gersonides was aware of the rather shocking Averroes thesis that all of humankind shares one intellect. Like the earlier Aquinas, he objects to this that, on this theory, we cannot explain how one person knows while another does not. When I talked about Averroes, I said that this is a bad objection, since Averroes already gave the answer, I experience thinking when the universal intellect uses my sensation, imagination and memory as a basis for thought. Gersonides understands Averroes well here, so he gives a better version of the objection, saying that if Rubin's intellect is the same as Simon's, then Rubin's intellect can use Simon's sensation just as well as Simon's intellect can. Even though Gersonides has no time for Averroes's idea of a single human intellect, he does accept the long-standing philosophical theory that there is one superhuman celestial intellect, the so-called agent intellect. Being a super commentator, maybe he liked the idea of anything superhuman. Like Al-Farabi and Avicenna, he gives this celestial intellect a role in activating human thought and also makes it responsible for giving forms to material things here on Earth. He notices a problem that previous philosophers had not sufficiently discussed. So focused were they on the theoretical knowledge achieved by philosophers that they never worried about where we get practical knowledge. He fills the gap by saying that the agent intellect helps carpenters know how to build wooden models of giraffes just as much as it helps biologists understand the essential nature of giraffes. Maybe I don't need to say that this isn't Gersonides's example. After all, the agent intellect is also thinking in practical terms, as when it provides Hiawatha with a long neck to get at those tasty leaves high up on the trees. Since the agent intellect is causing everything to happen on Earth on the basis of its universal knowledge, you would think that nothing would escape its notice. It should know every last detail of every event and being that falls under its influence, and that without needing to tap anyone's phones or steam open envelopes to read people's mail. But if this is the case, then a couple of long-standing philosophical problems would seem to be looming. First, will the agent intellect know what is going to happen in the future, for instance, what I am going to do tomorrow? If so, then it looks like I will have no choice about what I do. I know I promised in a previous episode not to bring up this problem again until we hit Latin medieval philosophy, but I am not as good at seeing the future as the agent intellect is. And then there's a second problem. If the intellect's knowledge is really universal, then how will it know about particular things? It might know all about giraffes and even be able to give the form of giraffe to suitably prepared matter, but it couldn't know that Hiawatha is right now taking a nap because that's a bit of information about a particular giraffe. This is just a version of the problem faced by Avicenna who raised the same issue, but with higher stakes, when he talked about divine knowledge. For Avicenna, God has only general knowledge of the universe, a knowledge God has only by knowing himself as the cause of the universe. This may have been the most controversial position taken by Avicenna, and that's against some stiff competition. It was rejected by many philosophers from all three Abrahamic faiths, including Maimonides among the Jews. Maimonides wanted to insist that God does know about particulars, albeit not in the way that we humans do. As Gersonides relates, in the Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides names five ways in which God's knowledge differs from ours. Whereas we have many acts of knowledge for many things, God knows all things with a single act. He also knows things that don't exist, but might have, whereas we know only what exists. God can know infinity, whereas we can't. God knows changing things without changing, as we do. And finally, my favorite, God knows what will happen in the future without ruling out the possibility that things will be different. One of the most interesting parts of the Wars of the Lord, and that's also against some stiff competition, is Gersonides's critical discussion of Maimonides's distinctions. He has especially interesting things to say about the idea that God's knowledge is infinite, and the idea that God could know the future while leaving open alternate possibilities. Concerning the first point, Gersonides flatly rejects the notion that any knowledge, even God's, could embrace something that is actually infinite. To know something is to place it within a certain definition or limit, the very antithesis of the indefiniteness that characterizes infinity. But in a sense, even we puny humans can know infinity. For instance, we know bodies to be infinitely divisible. What this means is not that we could know an infinite number of actually divided parts in a body. Rather, it means that we understand the essence of bodies, in light of which we realize that it is, in principle, possible to divide bodies an indefinite number of times. No matter how small, every body is divisible. The only alternative would be atomism, which Gersonides rejects. Gersonides's solution to the problem of future knowledge is similar. We have no idea what will happen in the future, but the agent intellect and God certainly do. This, however, does not mean that they already know in full and complete detail all that will occur tomorrow or a week from now or in coming years. Rather, it means that they understand the cosmic order and structure within which those events can happen. This is really just a version of Avicenna's theory. God does not know particulars as such, but rather knows the universal causal system that gives rise to them. So Gersonides is siding with Avicenna and against just about everyone else. But he prefers this to Maimonides's solution, which he finds barely comprehensible. If God knows that Hiawatha will take a nap tomorrow, how can it still be possible that she not take a nap? This so-called solution makes it sound like God is just making educated guesses, since he is leaving open the possibility that things will go otherwise than he predicts. This would be mere belief, not knowledge. Unfortunately for Gersonides, he happens to have some beliefs of his own that don't fit very well with the theory he is defending. He thinks that astrologers frequently forecast events accurately, that people have dreams that represent things to come, and that prophets can know the future, thanks to Revelation. In fact, he devotes the whole second book of the Wars of the Lord to precisely these phenomena. And astrologers, prophets, and prophetic dreamers certainly seem to be foretelling particular events. But Gersonides is nothing if not a consistent thinker, so, like a cowboy who has been assembling model airplanes, he sticks to his guns. In the case of astrology, for instance, he contends that the stars are signifying only the cosmic order, and that in exceptional cases, humans exercise freedom to depart from what has been predicted. In some cases, prophecies have a conditional form—if one thing happens, another will follow, which again depends not on certain knowledge of particular events, but on an implicit understanding of the cosmic order. He gives the biblical example of Joseph interpreting the Pharaoh's dream by prophesying a seven-year famine. This leaves it up to the Pharaoh whether he will act in such a way as to avoid the dire consequences of the famine by storing up grain in advance. Although Gersonides wound up covering all these topics and more in the Wars of the Lord, it seems that his original plan was to focus on that most controversial of topics for medieval Jews—creation, and the question of the eternity of the universe. Here, Gersonides takes an unusual stance, firmly rejecting the position of his two main influences, Maimonides and Iverroes. The world is not eternal, as Iverroes, and possibly Maimonides, thought. Gersonides argues that this is impossible, deploying a range of arguments familiar from the late ancient commentator Philoponus, and from Muslims like al-Kindi and al-Ghazali. He also adds an argument of his own, which has some deep philosophical consequences. Since Aristotle firmly rejects the possibility of anything being actually infinite, the question had always been whether past eternity would mean that an actual infinity has already been reached. So the opponents of eternity claimed that an infinite time would actually need to elapse to get to the current moment. The response from Aristotle's partisans had always been that past eternity doesn't count as an actual infinity, since past moments, humans, and events have ceased existing, so they can't all join together to form part of an actual infinity. Against this, Gersonides argues that, in a sense, past things do still exist, or are real. If the event of Socrates's death has now receded into utter nothingness, what would make it true to say, for instance, that Socrates died of hemlock? Metaphysicians still debate this question of what must exist now in order to make statements about the past come out true. Within the debate of Gersonides's own time, he gives his allegiance to the least popular option from among the possible positions on eternity that had been listed by Maimonides. Rather than accepting the possibility that the universe was created out of nothing at some specific time, or accepting that the universe is eternal, Gersonides adopts the view that philosophers writing in Arabic had always associated with Plato. On this view, the universe was created at a specific time, but not out of nothing. Rather, God used pre-existing matter as a basis to fashion the world. Gersonides claims to find an endorsement of this idea in the opening verses of Genesis. In our look at philosophy in the Islamic world, though, we have seen no Jewish authors accept the Platonic idea until now. The only Muslim to embrace it was the unorthodox Arazi. Clearly, Gersonides was no slave to Averroes, Maimonides, and his other sources. He firmly believed in the agreement of Torah and philosophy, but only once philosophy was suitably adjusted by placing it on firmer foundations. He thus represents the rationalist wing of 14th century Judaism, which was still wrestling with a legacy of Maimonides. But you need two wings to fly, so naturally there was another, less rationalist wing of the Jewish response to the great eagle. We've already looked at the so-called Maimonides controversy of the 1230s, but we haven't yet looked at the greatest medieval critic of Maimonides, who was another figure of the 14th century, born right around the time that Gersonides died. In his zeal to criticize Maimonides, he formulated searching criticisms of Aristotelian physics, anticipating various discoveries we associate with early modern science in Europe. So let's keep the momentum going as we move on with Hasdai Crescus, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Alhamdulillahi wa barakatuhu.