Alan Saunders: Hi, I'm Alan Saunders and this is the first of a special series of The Philosopher's Zone devoted to Jewish philosophy.

We'll be flitting around the centuries, stopping to spend some time on the great medieval thinker Maimonides, the 18th century German Moses Mendelssohn, and we'll also head to the 20th century to look at the ideas of Martin Buber. We'll attempt to take in an overview of something of the persistent questions and traditions of Jewish philosophy. We've had to devote two programs to this overview and, of course, we barely touch the surface.

Today we'll consider even whether there is such a thing as Jewish philosophy. And, well, there'd better be, because over the next five weeks on The Philosopher's Zone we're focusing on the world religion with arguably the greatest emphasis on rationality, Judaism. So, our journey begins now with Professor Tamar Rudavsky from the Department of Philosophy at Ohio State University. Tamar, welcome to the show.

Tamar Rudavsky: Thank you.

Alan Saunders: To begin with, Tamar, what makes Jewish philosophy Jewish?

Tamar Rudavsky: Well, that is a difficult question indeed. Let me try to contextualise the question by listing some of the Jewish writings throughout the period. So, we think we start, of course, with the Bible. We've got Piyut, poetry found in the prayer book, we've got Talmudic writings, the Mishnah, the Talmud, the Gemara. We've got medieval poetry, we've got medieval theology, we've got medieval what we want to call philosophy. We have early modern writings, we have the Jewish reformers in the 19th century, we've got 20th century post-Holocaust theology. So Jewish writings, Judaic writings really cover a wide range, and as philosophers we want to try to focus on that corpus which is truly philosophical. So, one way of going about this is really breaking the question down into two parts. What makes Jewish philosophy Jewish, and what makes the work philosophical? And I think we have to deal with both of those separately.

What makes it Jewish should be easy, but it isn't. I think we can start out by saying that one need not be a Jew to be writing Jewish philosophy. Being Jewish is neither necessary nor sufficient. In fact, some scholars have argued there's no such thing as Jewish philosophy. And this is a question I struggle with whenever I teach the course. Isaac Husik, very famously, he's a historian of Jewish philosophy, said, there are Jews, there are philosophers, but there are no Jewish philosophers and no Jewish philosophy. He pointed out that Maimonides himself would not have distinguished himself as a Jewish philosopher.

Alan Saunders: This is the great medieval philosopher.

Tamar Rudavsky: The great medieval, and of course you'll be devoting an entire show to Maimonides. But Husik says, Maimonides wouldn't have recognised himself as a Jewish philosopher. So, being Jewish isn't either necessary or sufficient, writing in Hebrew isn't necessary or sufficient. Many of our people wrote in other languages, in Arabic, in German, in Russian, in English. So that's not going to be a dividing criterion. I like to think of the content, that possibly Jewish philosophy is philosophy that addresses specific questions pertaining to central claims of Judaism, somehow dealing with some of the major issues within the Jewish corpus. What does it mean to be elected? What does it mean to be the chosen people? Is the law of Moses valid? And as we home in even on that criterion even more carefully, perhaps we can say that Jewish philosophy approaches these sorts of questions with specific tools: tools taken from the philosophical tradition itself as developed in ancient Greek philosophy, in the Arabic, in the scholastic tradition.

And so, I want to suggest that Jewish philosophy, to some extent, is a philosophising with and about the Jewish tradition, using classic Jewish texts, articulating questions and concerns within the context of a philosophical tradition, engaging in that tradition, the questions themselves being similar to questions raised in other philosophical traditions as well, and so we see, for example, Jewish philosophers talking about freedom of the will: do humans have free will? What is happiness? What is time? Prophecy; are there epistemological criteria for prophecy? Problems of theodicy. In other words, how can we explain the suffering of good people given a good God? These are all the sorts of problems that we'll find discussed by Jewish philosophers. Well, it's a start.

Alan Saunders: When you took us through the Jewish literary corpus, you mentioned the Talmud, the great... It's really I suppose a sort of an ongoing conversation about law with commentators, and commentators on commentators and so on. Should we see the Talmudic tradition as essentially rationalist, and to the extent that it's rationalist as being philosophical?

Tamar Rudavsky: Right. Now, again, you're putting your finger right on a very difficult question. I was in Jerusalem this past summer at a conference, and the topic of the conference was philosophy and the Bible. In effect, the purpose of the organisers was to make the point that what we find in the Bible and in the Rabbinic literature is philosophical. Now, I think that's a very difficult point to make. Many of the rabbis, many passages in the Talmud, are in fact philosophical. And many of the rabbis are very good philosophers. They discuss metaphysical, ethical, epistemological issues, they are extent logicians, I mean, I wrote a paper once showing the internal logical argument found in a certain passage in the Talmud. Excellent logicians. But I would maintain that the primary aim of these texts is not philosophical; it's religious. They are using their skills to resolve certain legal, social, theological issues in Judaism; they are not attempting to ascertain a deeper objective truth independent of these legalistic texts. They are completely internalised, the questions.

And I want to contrast that with the Jewish philosophers, who really are much more universalistic in their scope. Wanting to know what is rational to believe, their questions are metaphysical, epistemological, they connect to a tradition outside the Jewish tradition, which we rarely find among the rabbis. And so they're engaging in a conversation that actually goes far beyond the Jewish canon itself. And so while I would agree that, yes, there are philosophical nuggets in the rabbinic writings, there are philosophical nuggets in the Bible itself. Look at Ecclesiastes, look at the book of Job. Yet that's not the primary function of those works.

Alan Saunders: What about Jews who thought that you couldn't be both a Jew and a philosopher? Tell us about the Haredi traditionalists.

Tamar Rudavsky: I think the Haredi tradition really, really can be traced all the way back to the inception of Jewish philosophy. There has always been a deep mistrust of truth ascertained independent of God's law. And so we have, really, if we think about it as two completely separate chains of knowledge, one deriving from human reason, the other from Mosaic law, God's law, God's command. We have here the classic distinction, I mean, it sounds almost like a truism, but the classic tension between what's come to be known as Athens and Jerusalem. Athens, of course, representing Greek philosophy, reason, critical reflection, Jerusalem obviously reflecting the word of God.

And the Haredi shares with the ancient and the medieval the sense that any knowledge that derives independently of God is threatening, or can be threatening. Maimonides, the greatest, most important and influential Jewish philosopher, writing in the 12th century in North Africa, wrote his major work, The Guide for the Perplexed. The title itself, 'The Guide for the Perplexed', tells us that Maimonides sees the intellectual as one caught between two traditions, Jewish and philosophical. In the introduction to his guide for the perplexed, he actually describes such an individual, and it describes that person, and I'm just going to quote it here, that 'remaining in a state of perplexity and confusion as to whether he should follow his intellect and renounce the law, or hold fast to his law and draw back from his intellect.' And Maimonides says it's a lose-lose situation. Once you've opened Pandora's box, once you've studied Aristotle and Plato and, in his case, Averroes and Avicenna and al-Farabi, the Islamic philosophers, once you've studied these individuals there's no turning back. And so in a way he confirms the fear, the Haredi fear that philosophy can be very threatening. And so he writes his entire work as a response, as a way for medieval Jewish intellectuals to somehow reconcile or harmonise these two disparate traditions.

Alan Saunders: On ABC Radio National you're with the special Philosopher's Zone series on Jewish philosophy, and I'm talking to Tamar Rudavsky from the Department of Philosophy at Ohio State University. Let's turn back now to a big and formative figure who lived from 20 BC to 50 AD. Who was Philo of Alexandria?

Tamar Rudavsky: Well, now Philo is a very interesting figure indeed, yes. He really spans the millennium, he's a Hellenised Jewish philosopher, he's born in Alexandria, we know very little about him except that he made it his business to present Judaism to the pagans, as he put it, and philosophy to the Jews, trying to show each group that the other was not a threat. And so he's our first example of an individual trying to bridge that gap between Athens and Jerusalem. And so, for example, he writes numerous works. He writes works on creation, and he tries to show the creation story in Genesis as a perfectly rational philosophical account. Imbues it with neo-Pythagorean theories of number. He infuses it with neo-Platonism. He does whatever he can to present Genesis to the non-Jew as a very reasonable philosophical story. Does the same thing... he writes another treatise on creation, addressed to Jews, where he takes the philosophical accounts of the eternity of the world, and he tries to explain how they shouldn't be threatened by this, that they can actually reconcile it with their Genesis story. Does the same thing with Moses; presents Moses as this wonderful political figure. You know, sort of the embodiment of Plato's philosopher-ruler in The Republic. And tries to show the pagans that, 'See, the Jews had an idea of a philosopher-ruler; they've got Moses.' And so he spends his life really writing treatises directed both to the Jews and to the non-Jews, trying to develop a comfort level so that they can talk to one another.

Alan Saunders: You make it sound—I'm sure your account of him is sympathetic—but you do make it sound as though there's a bit of sleight of hand going on here.

Tamar Rudavsky: Absolutely. Absolutely, because the fact of the matter, if there are facts of the matter, is that when you line up Plato's eternity of the universe, and Genesis 1, it's going to be very difficult to reconcile those. It's going to be very difficult to reconcile the neo-Pythagorean account of number, according to which three and seven are perfect numbers.. . Philo wants to claim, 'Well, that's why God rested on the seventh day,' because he... and God was a neo-Pythagorean, God realised that seven was a perfect number, having gone through the mathematical proofs, etc. You know, that's a stretch of the imagination. But what's interesting is the attempt. Now, of course, what happened, what happens with Philo is that he gets completely lost. He's picked up by the Church Fathers, he's quoted by the Church Fathers, by Tertullian, by Augustine. He was very popular in the early Christian church. Jews don't read him at all.

Alan Saunders: Now, when Jewish philosophers, say Jewish philosophers in the Middle Ages, for example, turn to pagan philosophers for inspiration, from whom do they most take inspiration? Plato? The neo-Platonists? Aristotle?

Tamar Rudavsky: Am I allowed to answer all of the above?

Alan Saunders: Yes, by all means.

Tamar Rudavsky: Jews are taking from anywhere they can get inspiration. And I think that's really one of the wonderful features of Jewish philosophy. Sort of, move from Philo to the early 10th century, and so we find people like Saadia Gaon, writing in Egypt. And he is entranced with Islamic kalam. So he's working with the Mutakallimun writers, and I know you had a session on Averroes and Ghazali, and the Tahafut, and the influence of the Mutakallimun. Well, Saadia is right there, in the midst of that conversation.

We move 100 years later to the height, you know, the glory of Jewish philosophy, in Spain, in Andalusia, and we find Jews of course, writing as did their Arab compatriots in Andalusia, they are writing a neo-Platonised Jewish philosophy, they are reading bits of Plato, they're reading Plotinus, they're reading other neo-Platonic works that are circulating throughout the period, they're writing beautiful poetry describing the soul ascending to the higher spheres, dropping down. I mean, this is classic neo-Platonism. And you'll find people like Judah Halevi, Solomon ibn Gabirol, ibn Ezra, you know, consummate neo-Platonists. Then, what happens? The Arab philosophers discover Aristotle and start translating Aristotle from Greek into Arabic. The Jews are living in the same environment, they're excited, equally, they start translating from Arabic into Hebrew. And within a century, what you have is a tradition of Jewish Aristotelian philosophy, with a tinge of neo-Platonism, so you find someone like Maimonides... and we scholars who study Maimonides, some of us are convinced that when Maimonides writes about the creation of the universe and the creation versus the eternity of the world—is the world created or eternal?—some scholars will argue that Maimonides is a diehard neo-Platonist on this issue. Others? No, he's convinced by Aristotle. He's an Aristotelian. Some, a good colleague of mine, says, no, he's a neo-Platonised Aristotelian. He's both. And so what you find are Jews drawn to all of these philosophical traditions, as they make their way through the centuries, Jews bring them and incorporate them into their own philosophising.

Alan Saunders: Tell us about Gersonides, and his emphasis on rationalism in Judaism. Because he was interested in science and mathematics, wasn't he?

Tamar Rudavsky: Yes. We tend to think of science, as of course, developing the scientific revolution, 17th century, but natural philosophy, the natural philosophy of Aristotle, is the scientific worldview of the medieval philosophers, and so up until the early 17th century we can say that all philosophers were, or most philosophers, were engaged in natural science, natural philosophy. The two, probably the two most popular areas were cosmology and astrology. And I want to say something about that, because we tend to think of astrology as anti-scientific, but in the medieval period there's a very fine line between astrology and astronomy. Both sciences, in their mind, dealt with the celestial orbit, with the celestial bodies and their effect on the sub-lunar universe, the world, you know, down on earth, and someone like ibn Ezra, in the 12th century, who wrote very influential astrological treatises... In fact, I was surprised, I was actually on the internet and he is still being translated, and still being circulated among contemporary astrologers. I don't think some of them even realise that his Reshit Hokhma, Beginning of Wisdom, was published in 1148 in Provence.

And so it's against this tradition that we find Gersonides arising. I mean, Gersonides is probably one of my favourite philosophers. I think he's unfortunately overshadowed by Maimonides, and I think one of the most rigorous, careful, analytic, you used the word rational, philosophers in the medieval Jewish tradition. And I think for that reason, maligned over the centuries. His major work, written in 1329, Sefer Milhamot Ha-Shem, Wars of the Lord, was called by his detractors, Milhamot Neged Ha-Shem, Wars Against the Lord. They found it heretical. They found it upsetting. And why? Because he followed out a rational argument to its logical conclusion, even if it turned out to be inimical to certain precepts in Jewish belief.

So, for example, I mean, let's just, one quick example, with respect to this thorny problem, does God know particulars? And if God does know particulars in the future, does that rule out human freedom? Most of his predecessors, Maimonides included, I think really waffled on that question. They really don't want to give up on human freedom, but they don't want to claim that God is not omniscient, and so they come up with a compromise. Gersonides bit the bullet. And he said, look, if human beings are truly free, and he does believe that they are, then there are limits to what God can know. Then God cannot know the future, until it actually happens. Now, he does say that that's not a limit on God's omniscience, because there's literally nothing to be known, because the future itself is indeterminate, but you do not find this position among other Jewish philosophers. So that's a good example of, you know, the rigour that he's applying to philosophical issues in the 14th century.

Alan Saunders: Tamar Rudavsky, Professor of Philosophy at Ohio State University. And so we end this week in the 14th century. Next week, Tamar will join us again as we continue our overview up to the present day. The music you've heard this week is from Kim Cunio and Heather Lee, two Australians attempting to combine a recreation of 1st century Jewish tunes and scales with text fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Details of the music are on our website, abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone. We've got a special link on our homepage for this series on Jewish philosophy. There you'll find more information about our guests, there's some suggested reading, and, of course, there's the audio, so you can relisten to the show if you like.

The producer of The Philosopher's Zone is Kyla Slaven, and we've been soundly sound-engineered once again by Charlie McCune. I'm Alan Saunders, and I'll be back next week with more Jewish philosophy.