Maimonides makes extensive use of metaphysics in the Guide, but he does not discuss the discipline’s nature or many of the basic issues it addresses. Instead, the Guide’s readers would need to be familiar with the tradition of metaphysical inquiry that Maimonides draws on, which is that of the peripatetic philosophers. Aristotle’s Metaphysics stands at its head, and Maimonides received it mediated through Greek and Arabic commentaries. Among the major Arabic commentators, Al-Farabi is known as “the second teacher,” after Aristotle; the titles are accorded them by Avicenna, who credits Al-Farabi with enabling him to understand the Metaphysics.

“Logic,” to paraphrase the medievals, is an ambiguous term. Broadly speaking, it refers to the study, construction, and appraisal of argument, and in this sense it is similar to “reasoning.” More specifically, “logic” refers to a body of doctrines stemming from the Greek logical tradition, and, even more specifically, to those doctrines found in the nine books of the medieval Organon (Porphyry's Isagoge; and Aristotle's Categories, De interpretatione, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, Sophistical Refutations, Rhetoric, and Poetics).

A comprehensive survey of the place of logic in medieval Jewish intellectual life, in the broad sense of the term, would require nothing less than an analysis of the varieties of reasoning in the various disciplines studied by Jews, nonphilosophical as well as philosophical. Even the less ambitious task of tracing the influence of the Greek logic on medieval Jewish philosophy would call for a survey of the entire literature, because what philosophical work could be excluded? The present essay has more modest aims: first and foremost, to present a comprehensive survey of Jewish writings on logic in the Middle Ages; then, to make some general observations about the study of logic among medieval Jews; and, as an afterword, to sketch how some Jewish intellectuals applied the doctrines of logic to the fields of biblical exegesis and rabbinic jurisprudence.

Moses Maimonides (1138–1204; known also by the Hebrew acronym ‘Rambam’) is a paradoxical figure in the history of the philosophy of religion. He is thought by many to be the greatest Jewish philosopher who ever lived, yet he did not consider himself to be a philosopher. When he refers to “the philosophers” and “the men of speculation”, he generally intends those who wrote books on philosophy, thus separating himself from them. Born in Cordoba, Spain, Maimonides lived an active life in Egypt as rabbi, judge, communal leader and, in the later years of his life, as a physician in the Ayyûbid court in Cairo. His major work, The Guide of the Perplexed (hereafter Guide; c.1185–90), is widely regarded as a masterpiece in the philosophy of religion, yet its subject matter concerns the fundamentals of the religious Law (shariʿa/Torah), and its primary aim is the explanation of some difficult terms and parables in Scripture. Most of his early writings deal with Jewish law, including the Mishneh Torah (completed 1178–80) and his commentary on the Mishnah (completed 1168–70), the third-century law code that forms the basis of rabbinic Judaism. In the last decade of his life he primarily wrote medical books. Only one purely philosophical work, a short glossary of logical terms, is attributed to Maimonides, and that attribution has recently been questioned (Davidson 2004: 313–22). Nonetheless, his philosophical treatment of the fundamentals of Judaism – he was the first Jewish thinker to draw up a list of such fundamentals – and his largely Aristotelian outlook earned him the designation “the divine philosopher” by the Provencal savant, Samuel ibn Tibbon, who translated the Guide from its original Judaeo- Arabic into Hebrew.

The doctrines of the proposition familiar to medieval Jewish intellectuals were those of the Aristotelians (or the “Neoaristotelians,” because the doctrines contained Stoic and Neoplatonic elements), as transmitted and transformed during late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, in the Greek, Arabic, and, later, Latin traditions. The doctrines were so fundamental to the study of philosophy that elements of them are contained in some of the earliest philosophical writing among the Jews, even among thinkers who themselves did not write works in logic, or who are not considered by historians of philosophers as “Aristotelian.” Although traces of Aristotelian logical doctrines can be found in most of the literary genres of medieval Jewish culture, such as biblical exegesis, sermons, legal codes and commentaries, didactic poetry, and kabbalistic works, not to mention scientific, medical, and philosophical writings, the clearest and most thorough expositions appear in Jewish commentaries on logic proper. For this reason we shall focus in this chapter on sources devoted to logic, with an occasional foray into other works that are relevant to our topic, such as encyclopedias or philosophical writings that discuss logical doctrines.

A few words about these sources must be said. Although there is evidence that many literate Jews of Arabic-speaking countries studied logic as part of their education, and although specific Jews are named in contemporary Arab historical accounts as having been proficient in logic, or as having written logical works, we have extant in Arabic only one text devoted to logic written by a Jew, and that is the Treatise on the Art of Logic attributed to Maimonides.

[Part 1 Chapter 73]

A call upon the reader's attention

Know, you who studies this Treatise: if you are of those who know the soul and its powers and have acquired true knowledge of everything as it really is, you already know that imagination exists in most living beings. As for the perfect animal, I mean the one endowed with a heart, the existence of imagination in it is clear. Accordingly, man is not distinguished by having imagination; and the act of imagination is not the act of the intellect but rather its contrary. For the intellect divides composite things and differentiates their parts and makes abstractions of them, represents them to itself in their true reality and with their causes, and apprehends from one thing very many notions, which differ for the intellect just as two human individuals differ in regard to their existence for the imagination. It is by means of the intellect that the universal is differentiated from the individual, and no demonstration is true except by means of universals. It is also through the intellect that essential predicates are discerned from accidental ones. None of these acts belongs to the imagination. For the imagination apprehends only that which is individual and composite as a whole, as it is apprehended by the senses; or compounds things that in their existence are separate, combining one with another: the whole being a body or a force of the body.