Aristotelian Philosophical Programs in the Middle Ages

Many medieval Jewish philosophers had a commitment to an Aristotelian program of study, even though they usually approached this program indirectly through commentaries on Aristotle. In its earliest versions, this program appears as a loosely construed order of study (logic, physics, metaphysics, ethics, and politics) and a set of central concepts (substance, accident, form, matter, actuality, telos, nature, etc.), which made their way to Jewish thinkers via Arabic translations and commentaries. Later, it consisted of detailed study of Hebrew translations of some of those commentaries, especially those of Averroes, most often without the texts of Aristotle. These ways of studying the Aristotelian works defined how medieval Jews understood philosophy and science and what subjects they saw as beyond the reach of human understanding. In this chapter, we shall trace the outline of this program of study, starting from its appearance among Arabic-speaking Jews, then turning to Maimonides’s treatment of it, and finally to the formation of various scientific curricula in Hebrew in Southern Europe. This outline will trace not only what medieval Jews studied when they studied philosophy and science, but what they considered scientific and philosophical and what was left for other areas of thought.