JEWISH PHILOSOPHY: MEDIEVAL AND MODERN

Whereas medieval Jewish philosophy was to a great extent concerned with the ancient theological doctrine of the divine creation of the universe, modern Jewish philosophy has been concerned with it to a far lesser extent. To appreciate why this is so, and why those modern Jewish philosophers who have been concerned with the doctrine of creation are not concerned with it the way their medieval predecessors were, it is important to understand why the moderns viewed the very subject matter of creation – the created order of nature – quite differently than did the medievals. To miss this difference, and thus assume that a medieval Jewish philosopher like Maimonides and a modern Jewish philosopher like Hermann Cohen, for example, are philosophically constituting the doctrine of creation similarly, is historically naive and philosophically obtuse. To better appreciate what the moderns are saying requires us to distinguish them from the medievals, especially regarding their thoughts on creation, even though some of the moderns use the medievals' thoughts about creation as if they were but continuing medieval thought rather than radically differing from it as in fact they do.

When the medievals were dealing with the doctrine of creation philosophically, they were to a large extent employing the methods of the ancient philosophers of nature (first retrieved in the early Middle Ages by Muslim philosophers), who attempted to discover the first principles that underlie nature as an ordered whole: nature as cosmos rather than as chaos.