[Download] "Maimonides' Empire of Light: Popular Enlightenment in an Age of Belief (Book Review)" by The Journal of the American Oriental Society " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Maimonides' Empire of Light: Popular Enlightenment in an Age of Belief (Book Review)
- Author : The Journal of the American Oriental Society
- Release Date : January 01, 2002
- Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 192 KB
Description
By RALPH LERNER, Chicago: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 2000, Pp. 221, $35. Maimonides (1135-1204) a figure of enlightenment? Well, not exactly in the sense of the eighteenth-century Enlighteners, but as a popular instructor who brought "some basic notions of philosophy within the ken of ordinary men and women"(p. 11). It is Maimonides' educational work addressed to a popular readership that Ralph Lerner interprets in a 95-page monograph followed by 109 pages of English translations. The writings discussed are the "Epistle to Yemen," the "Mishneh Torah," the "Treatise on Resurrection," the "Letter on Astrology" and the "Guide of the Perplexed." Lerner also interprets a work by the thirteenth-century Maimonidean Shem-Tov ben Joseph Ibn Falaquera, and Joseph Albo's "Book of Roots" of 1425. Some of the translations am provided by other authors and are thus reprinted from their earlier or future publications, such as/eel L. Kramer's translation of the "Epistle to Yemen," Hiltel G. Fradkin's of the "Treatise on Resurrection" and Steven Harvey's translation of Shem-Tov's "Epistle of the Debate." Lerner himself provides the translations of the introduction and the first book of the "Mishneh Torah" and the "Letter on Astrology" (the latter also a reprint from his 1963 co-edited book on Medieval Political Philosophy).