Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Meredith Bach, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net [Transcriber's Note: This version of the text contains a number of UTF-8 characters. These characters may not appear if you don't have Unicode selected as your encoding (usually found under the View/Page menu) or the right fonts installed. The inverted apostrophe (ʿ) is used in this book to represent the gutteral ayin found in Hebrew and Arabic. The use of tildes (~) around a word signifies that the original was spaced out l i k e t h i s.] A HISTORY OF MEDIAEVAL JEWISH PHILOSOPHY BY ISAAC HUSIK, A.M., PH.D. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1916 _All rights reserved_ COPYRIGHT, 1916 BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1916. This book is issued by the Macmillan Company in conjunction with the Jewish Publication Society of America. TO SOLOMON SOLIS COHEN, M.D. AS A TOKEN OF GRATITUDE AND ESTEEM PREFACE No excuse is needed for presenting to the English reader a History of Mediæval Jewish Philosophy. The English language, poor enough in books on Jewish history and literature, can boast of scarcely anything at all in the domain of Jewish Philosophy. The Jewish Encyclopedia has no article on Jewish Philosophy, and neither has the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Hastings' Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics will have a brief article on the subject from the conscientious and able pen of Dr. Henry Malter, but of books there is none. But while this is due to several causes, chief among them perhaps being that English speaking people in general and Americans in particular are more interested in positive facts than in tentative speculations, in concrete researches than in abstract theorizing--there are ample signs that here too a change is coming, and in many spheres we are called upon to examine our foundations with a view to making our superstructure deep and secure as well as broad and comprehensive. And this is nothing else than philosophy. Philosophical studies are happily on the increase in this country and more than one branch of literary endeavor is beginning to feel its influence. And with the increase of books and researches in the history of the Jews is coming an awakening to the fact that the philosophical and rationalistic movement among the Jews in the middle ages is well worth study, influential as it was in forming Judaism as a religion and as a theological and ethical system.