2024.09.7 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Lenn E. Goodman and Phillip I. Lieberman, Moses Maimonides, The Guide to the Perplexed, Translated and with Commentary, Stanford University Press, 2024, 704pp., $50.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780804787383.
Lenn E. Goodman, A Guide to The Guide to the Perplexed: A Reader’s Companion to Maimonides’ Masterwork, Stanford University Press, 2024, 270pp., $26.00 (pbk), ISBN 9781503637474.
Reviewed by Warren Zev Harvey, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Moses Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed (or “Guide of the Perplexed” or “Guide for the Perplexed”), in the original Arabic Dalālat al-Ḥāʾirīn, completed in Cairo in 1191, was the most influential book in medieval Jewish philosophy. It was the last great work of the strict Arabic Aristotelian tradition founded by the Muslim Alfarabi, and served as a cornerstone in the Christian Aristotelian tradition founded by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. It is a notoriously difficult book to translate. It is written in a rich, erudite, and often recondite literary Arabic, generously peppered with Hebrew and Aramaic words. However, it presents itself as a series of epistles addressed to a favorite student, and thus its idiom is often colloquial. In addition, Maimonides had a penchant for…
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