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Leon Roth

Autore di Judaism: A Portrait

12 opere 90 membri 1 recensione

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Leon Roth is Ahad Ha'am Professor of Philosophy in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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To see a present truth in an ancient text is to free the truth of the bounds of space and time; by denying it history we assert its eternity. —Leon Roth

I found this little prize (a 1963 edition of a book originally published in 1924) on a discard table in the library of a local community college. Roth claims to have made a significant contribution to the study of the history of European philosophy by positing a previously under-acknowledged parallel between Maimonides’ challenge to the Kalam in Guide for the Perplexed (late 12th c.) and Spinoza’s critique of Descartes (17th c.). I don’t know enough about Maimonides or the Kalam or the conventional wisdom of 1924 to judge Roth’s conclusions, but I always feel a little better after reading about philosophy, especially when the argumentation is as clearly presented as it is here.

Descartes rejected the long-reliable Aristotelian logic as better suited for classification than for fresh discovery. The (new?) Cartesian logic called for analyzing a problem into its constituent smaller parts, each discrete and distinct, then arranging those constituents in some definite order, to move from one particular to the next, proceeding step by step toward a perfect knowledge of the whole. Roth notes the central problem of Cartesian logic: assuming a theory which gives us only discrete thoughts, how do we arrive at the whole of truth? What holds it all together? Responding to the queries of his critics, Descartes fell back upon God’s omnipotence: unity of the whole was a consequence of the ongoing creativity of God, who had arranged things according to His will, and His own ends.

Spinoza recognized the impossibility of building a system of logic on the basis of distinct ideas. If reality is made up of discrete units, he wrote, then there is no way for human thought to trace out connections in or between things, because such connections do not exist, except by the inscrutable will of the Cartesian God. Since Descartes also insisted that human reason and judgment were incapable of understanding God’s truths, knowledge of the whole is unattainable. Thought cannot cohere with thought in the individual mind, nor can an individual mind accord with other individual minds. Roth, paraphrasing Spinoza: “the unity which we deny to exist within the one cannot spring up miraculously between the one and others; without compulsion and consent between minds, the very idea of God is itself the fruit of merely personal speculation.” No wonder many of his contemporaries accused Spinoza of the most insidious atheism.

Spinoza rejected the impotence of human thought, and refused to consider the possibility of the universe being other than man could comprehend. God could have created things otherwise, wrote Spinoza, but man also would have been different ‘in order that he might be able to understand.’ Thusly, notes Roth, Spinoza placed the mind of man—not the power of God—at the center of things. He shifted the emphasis from will to intellect. Nature, God, the mind of man: all are of a piece in Spinoza’s system. Details and distinctions between entities are overshadowed by the organic unity of the whole. Recognition of the connections between things is the first step toward knowledge. In Roth’s restatement of Spinoza’s monism: “all things are what in practice they are, more through the essences of the other things with which they are connected than through their own.”

Descartes and Spinoza represented two distinct poles of thought, examples of which may be found in every age, writes Roth. He finds that the characteristic doctrine of Descartes was enunciated many centuries before by Arabic theologians formulating Islamic orthodoxy under the Umayyad Caliphate. The speculative cosmology of the Kalam—which included space atoms, time atoms, and ‘created’ accidents—denied movement, connections, and continuity to entities in the universe except by the continual intervention or volition of God. The Muslim schoolmen denied that theism could be merely creational: the world cannot go on without God, lest the hypothesis of God become superfluous. Just as in Descartes’ system, there could be no permanent essences in the universe apart from the will of God. To put time or motion into the universe (as Plato had a thousand years before in Timaeus) would be to surrender to materialism.

Maimonides’ chief objection to the cosmology of the Kalam was that it did not allow a permanence to the universe. The world according to traditional beliefs was a world in which anything could happen, since everything depended on the omnipotent will of God, who could do whatever He wanted. But fitting cosmology to the theological tradition precluded the pursuit of knowledge, which presupposes an organic unity of nature discoverable by human reason. In the Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides asserted the principle of the primacy of intellect over imagination, and of the duty of the thinker to interpret, and not merely follow, authority. Spinoza wrote of Maimonides as the first to openly pronounce that scripture must be accommodated to reason. According to Roth, the ultimate standard for Maimonides, as it would be for Spinoza, was the human mind.
… (altro)
 
Segnalato
HectorSwell | May 1, 2014 |

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Opere
12
Utenti
90
Popolarità
#205,795
Voto
4.0
Recensioni
1
ISBN
19

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