הגדרת המקום אצל אבנר מבורגוס ורבי חסדאי קרשקש

Rabbi Hasdai Crescas (d. 1411), the leader of the Spanish Jews at the end of the fourteenth- and the beginning of the fifteenth century, was the major Jewish critic of Aristotle. The aim of this article is to prove that The New Philosophy, a lost book of the apostate Abner of Burgos (d. 1347), was one of the major sources of Crescas's criticism on the questions of place and movement. The definitions of place and movement are two of the main features of all scientific theories. Aristotle defines place as the 'boundary of the containing body where it is in contact with the contained body'. This means that place cannot exist without a body, because it has to be the boundary of something. Moreover, the Aristotelian system does not tolerate a vacuum and the desire of a thing to return to its natural place is one of the major explanations of natural motion. In Abner's and Crescas's new theory, place is an abstraction, detached from any physical object and existing without a body in an infinite void. Place does not have any influence on the movement of an object; rather, movement is the consequence of the intersection between the property of the different body themselves.