Josef Stern, “The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide” (Harvard UP, 2013)
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What is the central premise of Stern’s new book on Maimonides?
Thank you.
Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel in the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel, along with Robert Talese, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together, we interview philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas, ranging from ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of science, to social and political philosophy, philosophy of mind, and many others. Today's interview is with Joseph Stern, the William H. Colvin Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago and Director of the Chicago Center for Jewish Studies. His new book is The Matter and Form of Maimonides Guide, which is just out from Harvard University Press.
The medieval Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides' most famous work, The Guide of the Perplexed, has been interpreted variously as an attempt to reconcile reason and religion, as a guide to philosophers on ruling the community while concealing the truth, or as an exegesis of rabbinical texts. In this innovative reading of a singular work, Stern argues that for Maimonides, reason and religion are just one domain, not two, that need to be reconciled. That biblical parable is in fact a literary device used to articulate our incomplete understanding of truths about general welfare and individual happiness. and that Maimonides is primarily motivated by the question of what the best attainable human life can be, given our embodied nature.
The Guide is, in effect, a primer that trains the reader to tease apart the multiple meanings of biblical texts, even though these exercises will not yield knowledge of metaphysics and cosmology, including knowledge of God. Stern combines deep familiarity with Maimonides, his works, and his intellectual environment with expertise in contemporary philosophy of language in this major contribution to historical philosophical scholarship. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Joseph Stern.
Hello. Hi.
Hi. Welcome to New Books and Philosophy.
Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
It's great to have you here to talk about your new book, Maimonides on Maimonides, the Matter and Form of Maimonides Guide. Before we get into the actual text of your book, of your reading of his book, maybe you can give us a little bit of background about yourself. I mean, how you came to philosophy and to this area and and to the writing of this book in particular?
Well, I don't know how I came to philosophy, but I do know that it wasn't until I started doing it and studying it that I had any idea of what philosophy is. The puzzling character of the ordinary person, finding questions, the value of distinctions, construction, evaluation of arguments, you know, the need to give justification, and, you know, in general, the attempt to find, to achieve philosophical understanding of some issue. I was raised as an observant Jew with a very strong background training in rabbinics and Jewish thought. philosophy, if you want to call it that, biblical interpretation. And maybe because I was always told, don't take the words of scripture and literally that I got somehow interested in language.
And then when I got to college and graduate school, I started doing philosophy of language and a lot of linguistics and semantics. And I stumbled onto The topic of my dissertation, which then became the subject of my first book, and a topic on which I've done a lot of work within a broader context, which is metaphor. I was working on compositional semantics, but I had to write a – I guess it was called a field paper or a distribution requirement in aesthetics – And I had an interest in art, but I never had really done much aesthetics. So I started thinking about metaphor. And I... noticed very early on that metaphors or metaphorical statements like Juliet is the Sun fail the usual substitutivity tests that we use to test for or to diagnose sort of the compositional structure of semantic structure of sentences and I asked myself why and that was the era in which people were beginning to attend first to
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central premise of Stern’s new book on Maimonides?
0:01–10:23
2
How did Josef Stern’s personal and academic background shape his reading of the Guide?
10:23–20:39
3
What are the traditional scholarly interpretations of the Guide of the Perplexed?
20:39–29:14
4
How does Stern argue that reason and religion form a single domain in Maimonides’ thought?
29:14–39:50
5
What role do biblical parables play in Maimonides’ philosophical method according to Stern?
39:50–46:24
6
How does Stern characterize Maimonides’ skepticism about metaphysics and cosmology?
46:24–54:30
7
What is Stern’s critique of the classic proofs for the existence of God in the Guide?
54:30–1:02:03
8
What practical implications does Stern draw for the best attainable human life?
1:02:03–1:09:33
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