Today we will be talking to Yehudah Halper about his new book, Averroes on Pathways to Divine Knowledge (Academic Studies Press, 2025).
The twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher Averroes sought to understand the divine in a way independent of religious theology, by turning to the philosophical works of Aristotle and, to a lesser extent, Plato. In doing so, he established standards of scientific inquiry into God that were and remain highly influential on Jewish and Christian thought. Averroes, however, does not provide much in the way of demonstrative knowledge of God, and most of his arguments remain dialectical, rhetorical, or political. This volume explores the various pathways towards attaining divine knowledge that we find in Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima, Metaphysics, and Nicomachean Ethics, and on Plato’s Republic, along with Averroes’ Epistle on Divine Knowledge, Decisive Treatise, and more.
Yehuda Halper is Professor in the Department of Jewish Philosophy at Bar Ilan University. He is currently a aisiting professor at University of Chicago Divinity School. His first monograph, Jewish Socratic Questions in an Age without Plato (Brill, 2021) won the Goldstein-Goren Book Award for the best book in Jewish Thought in 2019-2021. He is currently directing the ISF grant (#622/22) "Samuel Ibn Tibbon's Explanation of Foreign Terms and the Foundations of Philosophy in Hebrew."
Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid. His latest book is Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life.
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