Jewish Thought
Subject: Maimonides' Religious Ethics
Advisor: Prof. Moshe Halbertal
Abstract: For a long time, it was accepted in scholarship that ethics were given little literary attention in philosophy and theology in the Arabic-speaking medieval world. This belief brought upon a "metaphysical" way of telling the story of the intellectual history in the medieval Arabic-speaking world, meaning, the narrative was one of an ongoing discussion of questions concerning the world, God, the soul, and so on. Recently, a young movement in scholarship has started to seek to challenge this view, arguing that ethics was indeed a central subject for inquiry in medieval Arabic-Muslim thought, and that what changed, in comparison to classical ethical philosophy, was that it no longer was regarded as a fully distinguished and independent field from the other fields of philosophy. The central claim of these scholars is that the Arabic-Muslim authors' discussions of metaphysics, epistemology and psychology were ethically oriented and had an ethical purport, and that they were less oriented towards speculative discussions as such. Rather, they were oriented towards shaping human character and way of life. I would like to apply these insights in the case of Maimonides. I wish to develop an "ethical" reading of Maimonides, meaning: a reading that seeks to understands his project as an ethical one (in the widest sense of the word). This stands in contrast to the traditional understanding, which depicts Maimonides' project, first and foremost, as an attempt to deal with the tension between the philosophical truth and the content of tradition. I do not claim to contradict the claim according to which Maimonides indeed deals with tensions between philosophical truths and religious dogma; rather, I seek to develop an understanding according to which the focus of his work was not resolve this tension for itself, but rather the way in which resolving this tension fashions a certain religious way of life and a refined Jewish identity. An "ethical" approach to Maimonides offers a new reading in several ways. Firstly, it will examine his arguments and his literary techniques as such that have implications to essential ethical questions. Secondly, it will ask new and previously unexamined questions in Maimonides scholarship, like questions about his moral epistemology, his psychology of action and moral psychology, his view of religious habituation, and more. Thirdly, an "ethical" reading of Maimonides entails re-addressing the question of his textual sources. Maimonides scholarship, up until the present, has examined a collection of sources, which were originally pointed out in Shlomo Pines' classic paper on Maimonides' philosophical sources. It is true that since then, many researchers have added new sources, however the tradition the researchers have searched for such sources was, at its core, the one concerning the metaphysical questions. In contrast, in order to understand the way Maimonides regards ethics as a field and treats it specifically, I ask, on the one hand, to compare Maimonides to authors in the philosophical tradition that he has yet to be compared with, and that have received much recent scholarly attention in ethical and non-ethical contexts alike (like Fakhr al-Din al-Razi; Miskawayh; and al-Shahrastani). On the other hand, I ask to compare him to mystical and Sufi sources (like al-Muhasibi and al-Hallaj); and to Isma'ili thought (like al-Sijistani). This comparison can shed light on the connections between Maimonides' view on the knowledge of God and abstinence. Adding to these sources, I ask to compare Maimonides to Karaite thinkers, by reading previously unexamined manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah, with an emphasis on Karaite ethics, which by itself receives relatively little scholarly attention. Alongside examining new Muslim sources, an "ethical" reading of Maimonides requires to re-approach the religious and intellectual traditions that Maimonides reflects upon. Thus, I intend to inquire into Maimonides relations with classical ethics. Ethics in ancient Greece were eudaimonist, meaning, that at their center was the concept of human flourishing, or happiness. In contrast to this ethical framework, in which the virtuous persons driving concept, Maimonides receives also the Jewish tradition of rabbinic literature, in which religious value is ascribed to action, and "ethics" is a system of obligations, one that is largely indifferent to human character and the "happiness" or flourishing of the individual. An "ethical" reading of Maimonides seeks to raise the question: how did Maimonides deal with this fundamental conflict, which is not but an intellectual conflict, rather a crisis of the question of the way of life one adopts, Since as Talal Asas has emphasized (following Wittgenstein), a form of life is a much harder thing to shape and change than one's set of beliefs. This problematic that Maimonides dealt with was not one devoid of historical context: in the Islam's encounter, as an orthopraxy, with the ethical philosophy of ancient Greece, Muslim thinkers were faced with a similar confrontation. The specific Muslim accentuation and the encounter within Islam between the law and ethics, and between religious obligation and philosophical belief, are constitutive to understanding the way in which Maimonides fashions his own project.
Bio: A graduate student in the department of Jewish thought. I completed my B. A. in philosophy and the multidisciplinary program in the humanities, with divisions in Jewish thought and Talmud. My research focuses on Maimonides and his place in the history of philosophy in the Arabic-speaking world. I'm also interested in Rabbinic thought, especially in its historical context.
MA Honors 2022/23