Introduction

MAIMONIDES CONSIDERED apodictic demonstration (burhān) to be the surest tool the human intellect has for acquiring knowledge, since no one but the ignorant would think of rejecting a demonstration. At the same time, he acknowledges that some issues are not amenable to demonstration and consequently remain in dispute; issues of the sort, in his view, are absent from mathematics, present to a small extent in physics, and numerous in metaphysics. 1 Metaphysics here has the sense that Aristotle gives it in effect when he writes: knowledge of what is ‘eternal, immovable, and separate [from matter], if there is such a thing’, belongs to the science that is prior to mathematics and physics; the subject of metaphysics is what is eternal and incorporeal.

Maimonides nonetheless recognizes a role for demonstration even in metaphysics. He never tires of stating that the existence, unity, and incorporeality of a first cause of the universe, and hence the existence of God, can be demonstrated. He stresses that a number of negative propositions about God have likewise been demonstrated, among them: God is free of potentiality; God's essence is not composite; God possesses no characteristic distinct from His essence; His essence is unknowable, and no descriptive term can therefore be predicated of Him. The more demonstrations a person masters of what God is not, the more the person narrows down what He is, and the greater his knowledge of God. It is further ‘demonstrable’ that in God, intellect, the intelligizing subject, and the intelligible object of thought are identical with one another. ‘It has been demonstrated’ that God acts in the universe through intermediaries.

Knowledge of the supernal realm outside God is possible too, with the proviso that to some extent, recourse must be had there to proofs, which are less probative than demonstrations.