Overview

Gersonides’ Afterlife is the first full-scale treatment of the reception of one of the greatest scientific minds of medieval Judaism: Gersonides (1288–1344). An outstanding representative of the Hebrew Jewish culture that then flourished in southern France, Gersonides wrote on mathematics, logic, astronomy, astrology, physical science, metaphysics and theology, and commented on almost the entire bible. His strong-minded attempt to integrate these different areas of study into a unitary system of thought was deeply rooted in the Aristotelian tradition and yet innovative in many respects, and thus elicited diverse and often impassionate reactions. For the first time, the twenty-one papers collected here describe Gersonides’ impact in all fields of his activity and the reactions from his contemporaries up to present-day religious Zionism.

Full Product Details

Author:   Ofer Elior ,  Gad Freudenthal ,  David Wirmer
Publisher:   Brill
Imprint:   Brill
Volume:   62
Weight:   1.146kg
ISBN:  

9789004425279

ISBN 10:   9004425276
Pages:   674
Publication Date:   02 July 2020
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Available To Order  
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Table of Contents

Subseries Editor’s Liminary Note: Gersonides’ Afterlife—Towards a Collaborative Working Program Editors’ Preface List of Figures and Tables Part 1 The Reception of Gersonides’ Philosophical and Halakhic Oeuvre 1 “Composition, Not Commentary”: Gersonides’ Commentary on the Isagoge of Porphyry and Its Afterlife  Charles H. Manekin 2 The Supercommentaries of Gersonides and His Students on Averroes’s Epitomes of the Physics and the Meteorology  Steven Harvey and Resianne Fontaine 3 Crescas’ Relationship to Gersonides  Warren Zev Harvey 4 From Denunciation to Appreciation: Gersonides in the Eyes of Members of the Ibn Shem Ṭov Family  Doron Forte 5 Gersonides and His Sephardic Critics  Seymour Feldman 6 A Fifteenth-Century Reader of Gersonides: Don Isaac Abravanel, Providence, Astral Influences, Active Intellect, and Humanism  Cedric Cohen Skalli and Oded Horezky 7 Gersonides’ Philosophy in Fifteenth-Century Byzantium: Shabbetai ben Malkiel ha-Kohen’s Defense of Averroes’s Theory of Material Intellect  Ofer Elior 8 Gersonides’ Reception in the Ashkenazi Tradition  Tamás Visi 9 The Karaite Reception of Gersonides  Daniel J. Lasker 10 Gersonides’ Biblical Commentaries in a Fifteenth-Century Slavic Translation of the Bible  Moshe Taube 11 Gersonides’ Responsa and Their Reception  Pinchas Roth Part 2 The Reception of Gersonides’ Astronomical and Astrological Oeuvre 12 The Lunar Cycle of 11,325 Days  José Chabás and Bernard R. Goldstein 13 The Afterlife of Gersonides’ Cross-Staff and of the Poem Dedicated to It  Gad Freudenthal 14 Violas de Rodez’ Political Prognostication for the Year 1355: Reaction to the Prognostications for 1345–1355?  Hagar Kahana-Smilansky Part 3 Printing and Reading Histories 15 The Reception History of Gersonides’ Writings, according to Their Early Printing History (Fifteenth–Sixteenth Centuries)  Zeev Gries 16 Gersonides Hebraicus atque Latinus: Some Remarks on Levi ben Gershom’s Works and the Reading and Book-Collecting Cultures of the Renaissance  Michela Andreatta 17 Censoring/“Improving” Gersonides: The Case of the Toʿalot  Menachem Kellner Part 4 Gersonides’ Oeuvre in Nineteenth-Century Germany 18 Rabbi Abraham Nager and Ludwig Philippson—The Revisor and Sponsor of the Leipzig Edition of Gersonides’ Milḥamot Ha-Shem (1866): The Wissenschaft des Judentums and Orientalistik in Nineteenth-Century Germany (a Case Study)  Gad Freudenthal 19 The Rediscovery of Gersonides as a Religious Philosopher by the Wissenschaft des Judentums (1860–1890)  George Y. Kohler 20 Benzion Kellermann’s German Translation of Gersonides’ Milḥamot ha-Shem (1914–1916): The History of a Scholarly Failure  Torsten Lattki Part 5 Late Repercussions of Gersonides’ Oeuvre 21 Notes on Gersonides’ Place in Religious-Zionist Thought  Dov Schwartz Index

Reviews

For the first time, the twenty-one papers collected here describe Gersonides' impact in all fields of his activity and the reactions from his contemporaries up to present-day religious Zionism. (...) Highly recommended for all scholarly academic collections. - David B Levy, Lander College for Women, in Association of Jewish Libraries - New and Reviews December 2021 | January 2022, Volume II, No.6

Author Information

Ofer Elior, Ph.D. (2011), Ben-Gurion University, is Research Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Ben-Gurion University. He has published a monograph, critical editions and many articles on medieval Jewish philosophy, including a critical edition of Gersonides’ The Wars of the Lord, Treatises I–IV (Tel Aviv, 2018). Gad Freudenthal, Ph.D. (1981), Université de Paris I, is Senior Research Fellow Emeritus at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Paris. He has written extensively on the reception of science and philosophy in Jewish cultures, and edited numerous volumes including Science in Medieval Jewish Cultures (Cambridge, 2011). David Wirmer, Ph.D. (2010), University of Bonn, is Professor of Arabic and Hebrew Philosophy at the University of Cologne. He has published monographs and articles on Arabic natural philosophy and epistemology, including Vom Denken der Natur zur Natur des Denkens (Berlin, 2014).

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