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פרופ' יוסף שטרן, אוניברסיטת שיקאגו
In his Guide of the Perplexed part I ch. 68, Maimonides, in the name of the philosophers, draws an analogy (that he is said to have been the first to notice, though it connects two well-known Aristotelian doctrines) between the human and divine intellects: for each, the intellect in act, cognizing subject, and cognized object are identical. Readers of the Guide have found this analogy perplexing because its affirmative claim about the deity seems to contradict both Maimonides' advocacy of negative theology (laid out in the preceding chapters Guide I: 50-60) and his repeated assertion that there is no similarity between God's knowledge and humans'. In reaction, they draw one of two morals. Either they discount the negative theology and defend the metaphysical claim that the deity is an intellect or they try to explain away Maimonides' claims about the divine intellect as a theological ruse to deflect the radical consequences of his negative theology. In this paper, I argue, to the contrary, that Guide I:68 is a critique (rather than defense) of the philosophers' view that the deity is an intellect. Maimonides' criticism extends an objection, drawn from the Arabic Plotinus, that he had already raised against negative divine attributions: both the subject-predicate syntax of attributive propositions (including negated privations) and the relational character of knowledge violate the unity, or simplicity, that Maimonides demands not just of God but also, in order to achieve scientific knowledge, of our representations of the deity. After working out the details of this argument, I show its significance for Maimonides' skepticism about the possibility of human knowledge of metaphysics and its place in the context of contemporary disputes over Maimonides' epistemology. Time permitting, I shall also sketch the implications of Maimonides' skepticism for his account of intellectual providence and his conception of the task of philosophy. ההרצאה תינתן בעברית.
פרופ' ליאו קורי, יו"ר |
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