Description
``Can a philosopher be a mystic?`` Classical scholarship on medieval Jewish thought answered this question, with few exceptions, in the negative. This book, a collection of essays written over a forty-year period by David R. Blumenthal, offers a forceful positive answer - that philosophy was the penultimate step to post-philosophic, post-intellectual, post-cognitive religious experience and, conversely, that philosophic mystical experience was quintessentially philosophic in its preliminary stages and in its tone and quality. Calling on linguistic and cultural evidence, Blumenthal argues that even Maimonides, the towering figure of medieval Jewish philosophy, was a philosophic mystic.
The argument presented in this book, especially its application to Maimonides, should change the way scholars think about both medieval philosophy and mysticism.