INTRODUCTORY REMARK

Philosophy of science is a metascientific discipline. It takes existing scientific knowledge for its point of departure and reflects on it, asking questions such as this: What is meant by saying that a scientific theory is true, that it has been verified, or confirmed, by experience, that it explains phenomena, that science makes progress? It also reflects on the implications of scientific theories for metaphysics. Only rarely is the philosopher of science a scientist, and most scientists are not much interested in the philosophy of science.

Maimonides was neither a scientist nor a philosopher of science. Rather, he was very well acquainted with the most up-to-date science in the medieval Greek-Arabic tradition and drew on it in his theological investigations, whose results he addressed to a Jewish readership. He aimed to bring together, or accommodate, two bodies of thought, which at the outset were entirely unrelated: the Jewish revelation and tradition, handed down in a body of authoritative texts, and Greek-Arabic rational thought, as systematized by the great representatives of Arabic Aristotelianism.