Studies in Maimonides and St. Thomas Aquinas by Jacob I. Dienstag

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 151 Studies in Maimonides and St. Thomas Aquinas. (Bibliotheca Maimonidica: Texts, Studies and Translations of Maimonidean Thought and Scholarship , Vol. I).) Selected with an Introduction and Bibliography by JACOB I. DIENSTAG. [New York,] Ktav Publishing House, Inc., 1975. Pp. lix + 850. $25.00. This anthology of twenty articles (including five in German and three in French) consists for the most part in comparative treatments of Maimonides and Thomas. All twenty articles have previously appeared, and more than a few of them will be familiar to those working in the field. They are photographically reproduced in this anthology, with their original headings, original page numbers, and varying type faces, and consequently the book's physical appearance does not make a pleasant impression on the reader. In his Preface, the editor says that his purpose in reproducing these articles and collecting them into a book is " to provide background material for a more specialized phase of Thomist scholarship ." But more than half these articles were first published before 1989 (one of them is in fact from the nineteenth century), and only six of them are from the 1960's and 1970's. In a field such as medieval philosophy, which has been exploding with new discoveries even within the last twenty years, articles that antedate the Second World War are bound to contain more than a little outdated scholarship. In this sense, perhaps the majority of these articles are more likely to mislead an unwary reader than to provide useful and reliable background information for specialists in any area of medieval philosophy. In another sense, of course, they remain a monument to the direction and progress of scholarly work on Maimonides and Thomas and will no doubt continue to be of value to those with an interest in the history of twentieth-century scholarship on medieval philosophy . Dienstag's introduction to the volume consists in an alphabetical series ol biographical entries for various Greek and Arabic predecessors of Maimonides. Many of the entries concentrate on Maimonides's relation to the philosopher or writer being discussed in that entry-what Maimonides knew of the man's work, where he cites him, and so on. Each entry is accompanied by a short bibliography, which frequently reflects the entry's emphasis on Maimonides; the bibliography for Alexander of Aphrodisias, for example, begins with "Pines, Introduction to The Guide of the Perplexed , lxiv-lxxiv." The entries are generally sound, if somewhat subject to the perhaps unavoidable oversimplification which accompanies short summaries of major authors, but the reader may be a bit startled to learn that the Themistius who wrote commentaries on Aristotle was " Emperor of the East" (p. lviii) some thirty-five to forty-eight years after his 'ftoruit, during a period generally assigned to the Emperor Arcadius. 152 BOOK REVIEWS The editorial principles behind the ordering of the articles in the volume are not easily discernible; apart from a general grouping according to the language in which the articles are written, they are not apparently ordered in any way"'-not according to subject matter or date of initial publication or even alphabetically by authors' last names. In the interest of cogency, I will here divide the articles into groups according to subject matter and then discuss in detail the articles within each of the groups. All the articles in one way or another compare Maimonides and Thomas, but they emphasize different points of similarity or dissimilarity. The first, fourth, and ninth articles in the anthology concentrate on divine attributes and man's knowledge of them. The second article in the volume has to do with immortality of the soul. The largest group of articles (articles three, seven, ten through fifteen, seventeen, and twenty) consist in general discussions of Jewish influence on Latin scholasticism or particular treatments of Maimonides's influence on Thomas. Several of these articles also include a comparison of the two philosophers on divine attributes . The fifth and the eighth articles have to do with political philosophy and social doctrine. The eternity of the world is the focus of the sixth article, and man's position and status in the universe occupies the sixteenth article. And the last group of articles...