 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
the stream divides
[ 85 ]
Jewish Philosophy
After Philo, Jewish philosophy lay dormant until it flourished again, from the
tenth to the thirteenth centuries, as part of a general cultural revival in Islam.
During that time Jewish philosophers living in Muslim lands produced a varied
philosophical literature in Arabic, in which their approach was either kalam
or
falsafah , both of which derived from Arab philosophy. Prominent among philoso-
phers who did kalam , which stressed the application of reasoned argument to the
Scriptures and challenged rabbinical authority, was Saadia Gaon (882-942), who
wrote
The Book of Beliefs and Opinions . Prominent exponents of
falsafah
included
the Neoplatonist Isaac ben Solomon Israeli (c. 855-c. 955) and Solomon Ibn Gabirol
(1022?-1060?), who was known in the Latin West primarily as Avicebron (but
also as Avencibrol). Of these, Gabriol was the
most important for subsequent
developments in theories of the self and personal identity.
Gabirol was a Spanish Jew who wrote in Arabic. Many Latins thought he was a
Muslim. In Fountain of Life, he defended the quasi-materialistic view that with the
exception of God, who is not a being but one beyond being, all spiritual as well as
corporeal substances are composed of matter and form. What previous
philosophers, including Avicenna, had regarded as purely spiritual substances and
hence pure form, Gabirol argued are a “hylomorphic” combination of generic
matter and form. Humans, in contrast to “spiritual” substances, are composed both of
this generic matter and a combination of the four elements of which the lower
material world is composed.
Gabirol’s view was based, first, on the idea that only God is absolutely simple
(noncomposite) and, second, that composition is always a case of indeterminate
matter becoming determinate by the presence of a form. It follows that every-
thing other than God has some kind of matter. Physical objects have corporeal
matter, but even spiritual creatures, such as angels and the human soul, have
some sort of “spiritual matter.” Since the human soul has spiritual matter of its
own, it is a complete Aristotelian substance
in its own right. It does not really
reside in the body like an Aristotelian substantial form in unformed matter, pro-
ducing a single unified substance, for it already is a single unified substance.
This “hylomorphic” view of soul thus supported the Platonic idea that the
soul’s relation to the body is like that of a captain to his ship. It also supported the
more extreme idea that physical objects, all of which are composite, incorporate
many different forms, which are “nested together,” in a kind of genus-to-species
relationship. So, for instance, a given object might be corporeal, animate, and sen-
sate, all of which are ways in which matter can be formed. In objects, these forms
are not related to each other haphazardly but rather are “nested.” But the human
 |