Without Any Doubt: Gersonides on Method and Knowledge

361 Pages·2011·1.26 MB·English

by  Sara Klein-Braslavy

“Without Any Doubt”
Supplements to The Journal of
Jewish Thought and Philosophy
Edited by
Elliot Wolfson (New York University)
Christian Wiese (University of Frankfurt)
Hartwig Wiedebach (University of Zurich)
VOLUME 13
“Without Any Doubt”
Gersonides on Method and Knowledge
By
Sara Klein-Braslavy
Translated and edited by
Lenn J. Schramm
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2011
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Klein-Braslavy, Sara.
Without any doubt : Gersonides on method and knowledge / by Sara
Klein-Braslavy.
p. cm. — (Supplements to the journal of Jewish thought and philosophy,
ISSN 1873-9008 ; v. 13)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-20652-6 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Levi ben Gershom,
1288–1344—Knowledge—Methodology. 2. Jewish philosophy—Methodology.
3. Philosophy, Medieval—Methodology. 4. Levi ben Gershom, 1288–1344.
Milhamot ha-Shem. 5. Jewish philosophers—France. I. Title. II. Series.
B759.L4K54 2011
181’.06—dc22
2011008041
ISSN 1873-9008
ISBN 978-90-04-20652-6
Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
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For my beloved children, Yaron and Tammy

CONTENTS
Introduction: “Without any Doubt”: Gersonides on Method
and Knowledge ....................................................................... 1
The Opinions that Produce the Aporias in the
Wars of the Lord ........................................................................ 13
The Solutions of the Aporias in the Wars of the Lord ................. 45
Dialectic in Gersonides’ Commentary on Proverbs .................. 73
The Alexandrian Prologue Paradigm in Gersonides’
Writings ................................................................................... 117
The Introductions to the Bible Commentaries ......................... 151
Gersonides as Commentator on Averroes ................................. 181
Determinism, Contingency, Free Choice, and Foreknowledge
in Gersonides .......................................................................... 221
Gersonides on the Mode of Communicating Knowledge of
the Future to the Dreamer and Clairvoyant ......................... 297
Bibliography ................................................................................ 325
Index of Topics and Names ....................................................... 337
Index of Sources and Citations .................................................. 345

INTRODUCTION
“WITHOUT ANY DOUBT”:
GERSONIDES ON METHOD AND KNOWLEDGE
Gersonides—Rabbi Levi ben Gershom (Provence, 1288–1344)—was
a multifaceted and fascinating thinker, a unique figure among Jewish
thinkers of the Middle Ages. He devoted his entire career to philoso-
phy and science and was well-versed in every branch of the science of
his time. The scope of his oeuvre reveals him to have been perhaps the
most prolific polymath of all medieval Jewish philosophers. He wrote
supercommentaries on many of Averroes’s commentaries on Aristotle,
but was also an original thinker in his own right; in his philosophical
masterpiece, the Wars of the Lord, he conducted an independent inquiry
into philosophical problems and philosophical-theological questions
that had not been fully resolved (to his mind) before his day. He was
also an exegete who wrote an essentially philosophical commentary
on almost all of the books of the Bible, as well as a halakhist who
devised an interesting and original plan (never carried out) for legal
codes in which he would employ logical inference to derive the law
from the biblical text. Gersonides did not shut himself up in his study,
reading and writing and conducting theoretical deliberations about
scientific questions, on the basis of the philosophical and scientific texts
he knew. Instead, he was an experimental scientist, an empiricist—a
rare phenomenon in the Middle Ages. He spent many years observ-
ing the stars; drawing on his documentation of these observations he
prepared new astronomical tables and elaborated his own astronomi-
cal theory. To make his stellar observations more precise he invented
a new instrument, the Jacob’s staff, and improved other astronomical
devices that helped him determine the position of the stars in the sky
and measure their diameters. As a result he is considered to be one
of the most important and original astronomers of the Middle Ages,
among Jews and Christians alike.
Gersonides’ singularity lies in the way in which he viewed the several
facets of his scholarly work as a unified whole, with all parts interre-
lated, complementing and illuminating one another. There is an obvi-
ous link between his practical astronomy—his celestial observations,
the instruments he invented or improved, and the new astronomical
tables he composed—and his new astronomical theory; but there is