The central debate of natural theology among medieval Muslims and Jews concerned whether or not the world was eternal. Opinions divided sharply on this issue because the outcome bore directly on God's relationship with the world: eternity implies a deity bereft of will, while a world with a beginning leads to the contrasting picture of a deity possessed of will. In this exhaustive study of medieval Islamic and Jewish arguments for eternity, creation, and the existence of God, Herbert Davidson provides a systematic classification of the proofs, analyzes and explains them, and traces their sources in Greek philosophy. Throughout the study, Davidson tries to take into account every argument of a philosophical character, disregarding only those arguments that rest entirely on religious faith or which fall below a minimal level of plausibility.

In his own estimation, Maimonides was neither exclusively a dedicated philosopher nor exclusively a devoted rabbinist: he saw philosophy and the Written and Oral Torahs as a single, harmonious domain, and he believed that this view was similarly fundamental to the lives of the prophets and rabbis of old. In this book, Herbert Davidson examines Maimonides’ efforts to reconstitute this all-embracing, rationalist worldview that he felt had been lost during the millennium-long exile.

Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), scholar, physician, and philosopher, was the most influential Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages. In this magisterial new biography, the work of many years, Herbert Davidson provides an exhaustive guide to Maimonides' life and works. After considering Maimonides' upbringing and education, Davidson expounds all of his voluminous writings in exhaustive detail, with separate chapters on rabbinic, philosophical, and medical texts. This long-awaited volume is destined to become the standard work on this towering figure of Western intellectual history.

The six articles that comprise Book 2, Distinction 1, Question 1 of Aquinas' Writings on the "Sentences" of Peter Lombard represent his earliest and most succinct account of creation. These texts contain the essential Thomistic doctrines on the subject, and are here translated into English for the first time, along with an introduction and analysis. In Article One Aquinas argues, against Manichean dualism, that there is one ultimate cause of all created being; in so doing he gives three proofs for the existence of the Creator and the essential features of his answer to the problem of evil. Thomas establishes his definition of creation in Article Two, providing the needed distinctions between philosophical and theological senses of creation. Emanationism and the problem of whether there can be any intermediary causes in God's act of creation are the subject of Article Three. The next article demonstrates that although God is the cause of all created being, nevertheless creatures are true causes in nature. Article Five argues that it is from revelation alone that we know that the world had a temporal beginning, and that the philosophical arguments that purport to show either the necessity or impossibility of the temporal beginning are not persuasive. A detailed exposition of the meaning of the first sentence of the Bible, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," follows in Article Six.

This volume examines the approaches of Fakhr-al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1209) and Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) to the question of the eternity of the world, which was one of the most heated issues of debate between theologians and philosophers in the Middle Ages. The first chapter of the book gives some background to the discussion from Greek philosophy, early Judaeo-Christian and Muslim traditions. The second and the third chapters discuss the approaches of Rāzī and Aquinas respectively to the question of the eternity of the world. The last chapter compares their approaches, brings out some similarities of their approaches between them as well as in relation to their own traditions, Islam and Christianity respectively. The book tries to show that though they were theologians, both Rāzī and Aquinas were more in line with the philosophers than their fellow theologians.

The endeavour to prove God’s existence through rational argumentation was an integral part of classical Islamic theology (kalām) and philosophy (falsafa), thus the frequently articulated assumption in the academic literature. The Islamic discourse in question is then often compared to the discourse on arguments for God’s existence in the western tradition, not only in terms of its objectives but also in terms of the arguments used: Islamic thinkers, too, put forward arguments that have been labelled as cosmological, teleological, and ontological. This book, however, argues that arguments for God’s existence are absent from the theological and philosophical works of the classical Islamic era. This is not to say that the arguments encountered there are flawed arguments for God’s existence. Rather, it means that the arguments under consideration serve a different purpose than to prove that God exists. Through a close reading of the works of several mutakallimūn and falāsifa from the 3rd‒7th/9th‒13th century, such as al-Bāqillānī and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī as well as Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Rushd, this book proffers a re-evaluation of the discourse in question, and it suggests what its participants sought to prove if it is not that God exists.

This volume offers an updated analysis of the use, meaning, and scope of the classical notion of aitia. It clarifies philosophical and philological questions about aitia and offers bold and innovative interpretations of this key concept of ancient philosophy. The numerous meanings and nuances of aitia remain difficult to grasp. Ancient philosophers use aitia to explain the existence and activity of substances, bodies, souls, or gods. Paradoxically, its own definition remains difficult to establish. This book reconstructs some of the most important uses, variants, and scopes of the term aitia within different philosophical perspectives in antiquity, including early Greek philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, Stoicism, and Islamic philosophy. The chapters analyze metaphysical aspects, epistemological issues, and logical implications of aitia. They engage with the most relevant critical literature generated in several modern languages. In doing so, they offer an inclusive and overarching re-evaluation of our assumptions about causation and explanation in ancient philosophy. Cause and Explanation in Ancient Philosophy will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Pre-Socratic philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, Hellenistic philosophy, late antiquity, and medieval philosophy.

"Although Seeskin writes from a Jewish perspective, he deals with issues that are of equal importance to Christianity. His study is resource for scholars of Judaism, theology, philosophy of religion, and medieval intellectual history, as well as for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of monotheism."--BOOK JACKET.

Traditional theistic proofs are often understood as evidence intended to compel belief in a divinity. John Clayton explores the surprisingly varied applications of such proofs in the work of philosophers and theologians from several periods and traditions, thinkers as varied as Ramanuja, al-Ghazali, Anselm, and Jefferson. He shows how the gradual disembedding of theistic proofs from their diverse and local religious contexts is concurrent with the development of natural theologies and atheism as social and intellectual options in early modern Europe and America. Clayton offers a fresh reading of the early modern history of philosophy and theology, arguing that awareness of such history, and the local uses of theistic argument, offer important ways of managing religious and cultural difference in the public sphere. He argues for the importance of historically grounded philosophy of religion to the field of religious studies and public debate on religious pluralism and cultural diversity.