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Yehudah Halper, "Averroes on Pathways to Divine Knowledge" (Academic Studies Press, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Professor Yehuda Halpert
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Professor Yehuda Halpert
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Rabbi Mark Katz
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hi, and welcome to the New Books in Jewish Studies channel of the New Books Network podcast. I'm your host, Rabbi Mark Katz, author of Yohanan's Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. And I'm here with Yehuda Halper, a professor in the Department of Jewish Philosophy at Bar Ilan University and currently visiting professor at UChicago Divinity. And we're talking about Professor Halper's newest book, Averroes on Pathways to Divine Academic Studies Press is who put it out. And so we're very pleased to have you here today.
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Professor Yehuda Halpert
Thank you. It's great to be here.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
So let's just begin with a little bit about you. Can you tell me who you are more than just the biography I said and your pathway to writing this book?
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Professor Yehuda Halpert
Well, I am actually a graduate of the University of Chicago undergrad, where I studied math and classics. I was very interested in Greek philosophy, and after that I married an Israeli and moved to Israel and started to think about the connections between Jewish thought and Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotle, but also Plato. And that led me to my first book, which was Jewish Socratic Questions in an Age Without Plato. And now it also led me to my second book, which is this question of Averroes. Who is an important Intermediary between the Greek, the transmission of Greek philosophy to Hebrew, it stops in Arabic and it's largely mediated through these commentaries and other works that are written by Averroes and then translated into Hebrew.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
So let's begin with. Just tell us about Averroes. Where did he live, who was he, what did he write? Give us a quick biography of him.
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Professor Yehuda Halpert
So averroes was a 12th century cheddi who lived in Cordoba. He was important to think about him as sort of someone who comes along at the rise of the Almohad regime is a regime that's typically associated with like extremism of the 12th century. In the wake of their advent to southern Spain, lots of people, including Maimonides, including Judah Ibn Tivo and Abraham, Ibn Dawood, probably even Avraham Ibn Ezra had to. They left. They left southern Spain and moved to other places. France, northern Spain and in case of Maimonides, to Egypt. And this regime followed these doctrines of somebody named Ibn Tumard, who had a revelation in a cave and had a new idea of what it meant to be Muslim and what it meant to affirm the oneness of God's name. Hence their name, Al Muahidun, which means to become, to affirm the oneness of God. And this Averroes was becoming well known in this. As this regime was taking over southern Spain. And one of the things that he tried to do was develop kind of philosophical doctrine or teaching or set of teachings that could in some way work well with this new regime. And actually he failed. His. His stuff was. Was not well received by the regime. Eventually at first he was successful and then eventually he failed and they. He was exiled. His books were burned and it was prohibitions in the west, that is to say Morocco, Spain, on studying the Veroes. And he survives for two reasons. One is that he was actually extremely popular among Jewish people in Hebrew translation. Also preserving the Arabic with Arabic written with Hebrew letters, which is a lot of the manuscripts are like that. And he was also extremely important for the development of Latin philosophy as he was translated pretty early on in the 13th century into. Into Latin and entered the universities as part of the curriculum. So both Jews and Christians ended up spending studying Averroes as part of studying sort of basic science and logic and forming their kind of university curriculum or university style curriculum in the case of Jews who couldn't go to university. And that became sort of the basis of Western education.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
Now you mentioned that there was a kind of political underpinning to some of his writings. And you do Mention that by the way, in the book. The book isn't mainly about that, but because you mentioned it now, I'm wondering if you can say a little bit more about that. There were some political motivations to some of the changes that he made when he was quoting Aristotle and to some of the ways he presented information. Can you speak a little bit about that?
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Professor Yehuda Halpert
So Averroes's sort of best known doctrine is something that shows up in his decisive treatise, Fasala Maciel. And in this treatise he sort of divides humanity into three types of people by nature. And somehow this is also reflected by law. And the three types of people have to do with how they form ascent, which is a logical method of coming to know something. How do you know that you know something? So this is sometimes called second order knowledge. So you know something and you know that you know something. So if you know that God exists, you know something you think about God is one. And how do you know that you know that? So if you know that you know the things you know. I know this sounds complicated, but that's philosophy. If you know that you know the things that you know because somebody told you that or because you believe a lot of people who told you that, that he calls that rhetorical people and that's most people. There are also dialectical methods which is more complicated. And then there are also methods by demonstration, demonstrative methods. And this is supposed to be reflected in law. And the people who come to know by demonstrative methods are the people he considers the true scientists, the true philosophers, people who should be able to understand something that is important about religion through science alone. Now these people, they, he's very interested in separating them and separating their interpretations on a legal level from interpretations of, of the Quran proper. So things that you have to keep secret and things that you can only discuss are with other demonstrative classes. So that, that's a lot of his political understanding has to do with this kind of protecting science from the non scientific people. And part of this is an idea that scientific reasoning for demonstrative reasoning and pure reasoning is something that most people don't get, they won't get and they're subject to other influences that will say run over those kind of scientific understandings. So there's a political importance of preserving the scientists as a kind of independent class, which is what he ends up doing. And this ends up being actually important also for later thought, for modern liberal political thought which also sought to preserve this kind of the notion of the independence of human reasoning. The notion of independent human, independent thought and why that should be separate from politics, but also why it should be separate from religious thought. In a certain sense, it can interpret religion, you can explain religion in a philosophical or scientific way, but that's not the way most people do it.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
So I want to return back to that threefold model that you talked about, partly because you spend actually a lot more time on dialectical than you even do on demonstrative in your book. I'm wondering if you can talk about what is dialectic. Why does it matter? What's his view on dialectic? And why does he believe that demonstrative and defined. Demonstrative. Also in lay terms, why does demonstrative supersede dialectical when it comes to different ways of assessing how you know what you know?
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Professor Yehuda Halpert
Okay, so that's, that's a, A really central question to my book. It's very important. Thank you for asking that. That's the. When we talk about demonstration, usually there's a number of conditions that something have to be have for it to be demonstrative. It has to be certain. I'm going to start with the demonstrations now. I'll get to the dialectic has to have a certain. Has to be certain, meaning that you know that you know something with. With certainty. And this usually involves a syllogism that is in the proper form. And it is, it's correct in form. It has premises that are certain. There are more things. It can also express the cause. There are other ways of talking about what it means to be a demonstration. And Averroes kind of has this sleight of hand where he sort of says, this is what science is all about. It's all about demonstration. If you know something demonstratively, you know that it's true with 100% certainty. And the reason I say it's a sleight of hand is because, in fact, you have very few cases where you actually have demonstrations. Most of the time, most philosophers and most scientists cannot demonstrate most of what they're doing. And so they are left with, in fact, this kind of dialectical type of argument. Now, dialectical type of argument is there are a number of things that make dialectic dialectic. One of them is this kind of adversarial position regarding contradictories. So instead of trying to support an argument by making sure the premises of the argument are certain, valid and certain, you might try to make an argument by saying, well, here we have two sides of a contradiction. We have a and not a. And if we could rule out one of those sides, then we have to accept the other side. And you, you can do this in verbal jousting, like a dispute, a disputation with somebody else. And you can do this with, with all sorts of other methods of building up arguments also often in the form of a syllogism, if you're Aristotelian. And those arguments also support one of the sides of the constitution and rule out the other. And what it turns out for a lot of metaphysics and maybe most of that physics. So really the tough questions, the questions about God, the questions about what it is to be, the questions about how do you found scientific reasoning at all on anything. So these questions are things that you really aren't going to have a demonstration for and you have to sort of approach them with a dialectical understanding. And what's so interesting and important about that for Averroes is that you're already no longer on this demonstrative method that you pretend to be as a scientist. To really get to the questions that are really most important as a human being is to go outside of that.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
Hence your title, Averroes on pathways to Divine Knowledge. Correct?
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Professor Yehuda Halpert
Yes, that's right. And I see it as, I mean, I don't think this is the only thing and I haven't, haven't fully explored. I mean, I guess people who have struggled through my book and I know it is tough reading, don't want to find out that I really don't have all the answers to Averroes. There's a huge amount of writing on the topic, but I'm, I. And it's, it's, it's a pathway for me as well. I'm, I'm trying to get more and more out of whatever reason is doing. But, but yeah, I don't think a lot of what he's doing is, is in many, many cases is not demonstrative. And you end up having to understand properly as a dialectic method or dialectic methods.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
So let's back up for a second because I want to get into a huge part of your book was assessing these three different commentaries on Aristotle's metaphysics. The long, the middle and the short. But before we get into those commentaries, can you say a word about who Aristotle was to the thinkers in Averroes time?
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Professor Yehuda Halpert
So Aristotle is a. He is, we think of him as the successor to Plato and that's correct. And he does develops his own Aristotelian philosophy, but with one of sort of the founder of the Islamic Falsafa movement, someone named Abu Nasr al Farabi Aristotle becomes also an icon of independent human thought. And what I mean by that is that he is somebody who is, is not Muslim and he's not a monotheist. And they knew this. And because Aristotle is not a monotheist and because he's not Muslim, he is. He can approach questions about God, about the divine, about the metaphysical issues using only the human mind. Now actually, this isn't true about Aristotle. We know that he talks a lot about Greek tradition and Greek beliefs in later books of the Metaphysics, but that's not the impression that they sort of came up with. It's kind of a mythological Aristotle. And that's actually, that's actually really important. So you have these, this person who is, he's the mythological character. And I've always subscribed to this very clearly as somebody who goes as far as human reason can go in understanding God. So understanding Aristotle is to understand the most that human reasoning on its own can get to, and that. That's an extremely central part of that. But at the same time, the texts that we have of Aristotle are in, well, they're in bad shape by the time we get to someone like Averroes. They had been translated mostly in the 8th and 9th centuries in, in. In the Baghdad area by people who had. They knew Greek, they spoke Greek, but they weren't mostly weren't philosophers. This is particularly true the Metaphysics. The translation of Ustaf is not particularly detailed, not very good. It has an attempt to become as literal as possible, which is extremely difficult, from Greek into Arabic. And so you have a text that's actually very difficult to understand what it's even saying on the most basic level, because of this, these terms, the term choices, the syntax, et cetera. And by the time you get to Averroes, who's in the 12th century in the other side of the world in Spain, it's already is quite obscure. So it's, it's a. It's both the most the human mind can get and also on the textual level, almost impossible to understand or very difficult to understand.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
So let's talk about his commentaries. Before we look at each of the different commentaries. Can you speak for a moment about why he needed to write three of them?
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Professor Yehuda Halpert
This is the biggest question about Averroes. And what I do know is that I don't know the answer to it. So. And this is, this is the, the. You don't know why he wrote three commentaries. And he went back and he corrected some things in some of the commentaries and we don't know why he did that either. We don't know what, what he was.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
What he was doing.
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Professor Yehuda Halpert
This is. These are really very difficult questions. The short, the short commentaries seem to be earlier. They seem to be written much more under the influence of Avicenna IBN Sina, who is less likely to. To see Aristotle in the same way as this Al Farabian myth as the totally independent most human mind can go. But. But to sort of try to incorporate Aristotelian system into his own system, which is also somewhat. A little more religious in a sense, whereas Averroes himself tries, eventually tries to kind of separate about religion and philosophy. And we see that more in the later commentaries. The middle commentaries for the most part are like a restatement of the texts. The text is pretty bad, as I said, it's very hard to sort of read it. So he wrote his own version of it. And in doing this, he invents a kind of system about how to translate, how to be an Aristotelian, a coherent Aristotelian system. And these were the primary texts that were used as for the scientific textbooks, in Hebrew translation and in Latin translation in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance and even in the Earth, like quite late into the modern period. We also have his long commentaries which preserve the. There aren't that many of them, but there is one on the Metaphysics. They preserve the text of Aristotle and they try to explain it line by line. And a lot of what he's doing is trying to say, okay, well, how does this fit into the system, this Aristotelian system? How does it work in this way? But one of the striking things that we get with all these commentaries is that they're different, they're not the same, and that we end up with. We have a notion of a kind of system that seems to be the same everywhere, but when we actually put it together and we look at these different details, it's actually pretty hard to see what's what. And it ends up being quite disorienting.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
In your book, you did talk a little bit about the different audiences that may have been reading these different commentaries. For example, one of the commentaries being much more a summary in language that a layperson could understand, whereas others were for the more El. Can you speak about that for a little bit?
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Professor Yehuda Halpert
Yeah. So the, the short commentaries in general are. Are. Are in a way simpler. They're more. They're easier to. To get to if you're. If you're doing. If you're a Muslim at that time. And the long commentaries are really an extraordinary effort to get through. So it's. You could call it an elite. You can call it intellectual people who are really dedicated scholars. That's a probably better way to say it. Dedicated scholars. I did use the term elite in the book, but it is. Students often don't like it. But. And it is a. You know, they're dedicated scholars, people who are willing to go through the text many, many times. And I think that there is a kind of way in which they assume a different level of patience in the readers. So like a, A short commentary reader might be assumed to this is it. He's going to read the short commentary. Uh, and that's. That's. If he even makes it through all that. That's going to be great. Middle commentary. Quite a bit more patience and, and the long commentary, you're. You're talking about somebody who is almost psychopathic level of patients to sit through a. The text, how the text corresponds to the system and then Verita's interpretation of the system. And these are very long.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
One of the things I was thinking about as I was reading your book, I was thinking about a interview that I did, I think a few interviews ago with Iris Adelson Shine, who I don't know if you've encountered her, but she's a professor in Israel.
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Professor Yehuda Halpert
Yeah, I know her. She doesn't even Mind.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
And she was talking about translation and how when kind of early modern Hebrew translators would translate texts from the Christian world, they would kind of bring it in and to make it their own. They might change their names, they might. Of the characters, they might change some of the themes. A setting that was a church suddenly became a synagogue. And I noticed that you spoke in a few different ways about times that Averroes kind of quote played with Aristotle, making it work in his translation for his milieu. I'm wondering if you can say a little bit about that.
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Professor Yehuda Halpert
Yeah, well, some of these things are issues that come up in. I mean, some of them are cases in the way that we. That. That you just described that, that Iris was talking about where you have. Aristotle likes to use in some cases, the example of idols, idol maker, a statue maker. So in the middle commentaries, Veroes translates it, usually ring maker, which would be, I guess, a less controversial profession. Though in the long commentary, he doesn't, he doesn't do that. So that, that could be an example of sort of making it. Making it his. His. His own in that sense, in terms of. Of. Of other things that, that happen when you translate. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that happens when you translate from Greek into, into Arabic. And particularly with an author like Aristotle who's actually very specific about. And he's developing his own terminology. He has terminology for categories, he has terminology for specific terms, which is a big part of what the book addresses. But he also has. And he has terminology for things that are going on inside the soul, what's happening outside the soul, when you're thinking about things. And a lot of these terms, sometimes when they come in just in translation, they end up taking on a life of their own. So one of the terms that I talk about a lot in this book is the term mana, which is. Is the term for meaning. It means meaning, it means notion, it means form. It can mean a form of something, especially a form with a kind of relationship to a thing outside in the world. And it's a term that kind of underlines so many different things because it's really the subject that we want to talk about when we're really talking about a metaphysical notion we want to talk about. We don't want to talk about the term because even metaphysical terms usually have many meanings. We want to talk about the right type of meaning that's going to get us to what we. What we want. And there's a whole notion, a whole theory here with this notion of notion, the notion of Meaning actually corresponds also to various ideas that he puts in the Dan terpetizione transition tradition of meaning of words, but also in the. The anima tradition of meaning of things that happen in the soul. And I will just note that this term in Arabic comes into Hebrew as inyan, where for many, many years it's actually a technical term. And this is extremely confusing for modern speakers of Hebrew because it's anything but a technical term in its modern use. And it's very difficult and very interesting to sort of grapple with this term and to see how that works.
- [25:22]
Rabbi Mark Katz
That is really fascinating. I'm going to read you a quote, your own quote from very early on in your book, and I'm wondering if you can reflect a little bit on it, because I found it very interesting and provocative. The reader of Averroes does not gain access to the truth newly discovered by an original thinker, but to a way of grappling with how to reach that truth.
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Professor Yehuda Halpert
All right, so this, this, this is, in a way. Well, it is, it's a great quote to encapsulate the book because it is, it is what I do, what I talk about in this book. Metaphysics as a science is supposed to unify or supposed to be the divine science, the science about God. It's supposed to be the science about being. It's supposed to be the science about truth, which in Arabic, chak is also God. And it's also big. Uh, it's also all of these things kind of fold in on. On one another. Uh, and the question about how to reach them, reach this thing, this truth, this, this being, is actually extremely difficult. And it's not at all clear that it is, Is possible to do this. It's fairly clear that it's not possible to do it in a purely demonstrative way, because the cause of the truth is going to be the truth itself, if the truth is God. And so you can't know the cause, you can't know it by knowing its cause, because it is the cause of other things. That's the more or less the basic argument that also appears in Maimonides's Mishnah Torah and in other places. And that that causes a problem for the demonstrative approach to it. And once we don't have a fully demonstrative approach to the truth itself, then we're left with these dialectical approaches. And the dialectical approaches are always going to be kind of beating around the bush in a way. So this is. Yeah, in a way, the book could have been called Beating around the bush, right, With a good biblical image of the bush also being on fire at the time. Because it is dealing with extremely difficult concepts that really are kind of beyond what we can do. But we do nevertheless by taking these multiple approaches in different commentaries. In the book, I deal with Averroes's commentaries on the Deanima. I divide. Deal with his Epistle on the Divine Knowledge. I deal with three commentaries on the Metaphysics. I deal with the commentary on the Plato's Republic. So there's. There's always these different approaches in all these different works and sometimes within the same works. That's. It's quite a lot of material. And you surprisingly, I think you actually do get somewhere in a way.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
What you're describing is almost like an asymptotic process, right? That you get closer and closer to the truth, but you never quite get there. And you do have an essay in your book on kind of desire or yearning for the active intellect. And the way that. The way that we're kind of yearning for that is in a way a macrocosm of the kind of desire or eros that exists in the human being. I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit about that, because it was a fascinating idea.
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Professor Yehuda Halpert
So this idea is one of the few ideas that is really. It's. It's really Platonic in the most basic way. It's something that we find in Plato's. The. We find it in the Symposium. And the idea of the human being as a yearner or as an erotic desire, as Plato says, for. For the truth or for. For the good or for beauty. Really the thing you really yearn it for is beauty according to Plato. And this is one of the respects in which it kind of comes into Aristotle a little bit. He's a bit more. He describes yearning as one of the ways something that is not moved but move something else. So something can move something else by not without being moved itself. So in other words, if. If something is yearned for, it can move the yearner to do something, to act in a certain way, to. To. To behave in a certain way, or to give gifts, to do all sorts of things to the yearned for without actually doing anything, just by being the one yearned for the. The long for. And Aristotle uses this actually as an analogy for how the unmoved mover moves the universe. And it's not clear how far he goes with the analogy. Like so many of the most important statements in, in Aristotle, it's kind of stated ambiguously and it's you could. You could take it in different directions. And then he. He doesn't do that much with it. But the commentators do a lot with this, including Averroes. And they see the whole universe as yearning for God. And the movements of the entire universe are in some sense connected to this. And it's particularly true of human beings. And what's interesting about Averroes in particular is that he also adopts Aristotle's notion in the Ethics that the yearner or the erotic desire is kind of a pathetic figure. It's not somebody we want to be. It's somebody who is. We say it right. Erotic desire. Well, we don't want to be that. That sounds kind of gross. This is somebody who is. Is, you know, sleeping in. In doorways because he wants to catch a glimpse of the beloved. He's somebody who is. Is, you know, a stalker. Right? He's not behaving properly. These are people we don't. You know, you put it. You call it a stalker and you really don't. You don't like it. Um, but he also associates that with essentially how it is a human being sort of comes to this knowledge of. Of God. And that is also in a way, as this kind of stalker, as this erotic desire, as somebody who has to do a huge amount of work which is not appreciated by the beloved. And to do all this work is to. And just to get a glimpse of. Of the beloved, of. Of God. And this is an image that we find also in Maimonides very prominently with. With, well, human beings as philosophers and. And the ultimate realization of human connection with God through this. Through the kiss. Kiss of God and Moses and Aaron, but not Miriam, because he said that would be inappropriate. But he.
- [32:03]
Rabbi Mark Katz
And.
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Professor Yehuda Halpert
And we also find this in. It's. It becomes a very appealing image to many philosophers and certainly also Kabbalists in the Middle Ages. So it's. It is a really important point of contact, this kind of notion of the human being and the human being philosopher, as a yearner, as a desire, an erotic desire for. For the divine.
- [32:26]
Rabbi Mark Katz
I just want to make sure I understand a point that you made, because it's fascinating, if I'm understanding you correctly, which is that really famous passage at the start of the Zohar where it talks about, you know, the person standing outside the tower and seeing, you know, the woman's hair and just looking to get a glimpse as a kind of metaphor for us standing outside, looking for truth, that you can draw a straight line from Averroes to the Kallas in terms of him developing that idea of desire and then it culminating in Kabbalistic thinking.
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Professor Yehuda Halpert
Well, I, I mean, that's a good question if there's a straight line or not. But it's definitely part of the same group of thinking that actually is. Is heavily influenced ultimately from Plato. This is a Platonic way of thinking. It comes through Aristotle and through interpretations of Aristotle. And it very much is very, very possible that when it comes to the Zohar, it's, it's coming in that way, through that. I, I can tell you about later Kabbalists like Johann Alemano and in Italy who are in the 15th century, who are reading actually Plato and they're also reading Aristotle and they're also reading medieval Averroes. And then you can actually see a direct connection between them. So there is, there is some for that. The, the Zohar is, is of course, a mystery and a very complicated one that is beyond my ken. But it, it would, it would. It's. It's very much on the same wavelength, certainly. And I think that it would not be surprising that it were true. And it very well may be so.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
Very much in the air that they were all breathing, even if they weren't reading each other.
- [34:04]
Professor Yehuda Halpert
Yeah, exactly.
- [34:06]
Rabbi Mark Katz
That's very interesting. I want to talk about the form of your book for a moment. Your book makes a series of arguments, but it does it in pretty disparate essays. I'm wondering what the pathway to your book's publication looked like. I know some of these were papers you wrote, others you wrote specifically for the book. How did you end up deciding kind of what to talk about, since you did talk about so many different works of Averroes and kind of coming together in their, I guess, shared desire to understand how we know what we know?
- [34:40]
Professor Yehuda Halpert
Well, when I originally conceived of this book, I conceived of it as a much greater unity and that everything would kind of fall into place and I would have this perfect understanding of how to reach the divine according to Averroes, particularly through the study of Metaphysics Delta and some of these other. A few other texts that were necessary for studying that. But the more I studied these things, and this book is a product of 15 years of work. So the more I spent on these texts, the more time I spent looking at them, the more I realized that actually there isn't. This kind of unity is not going to happen. And it's not. There isn't a unified way of doing this. And, and he does. He's always. He himself is actually always restarting from a different Vantage point. How do. How do you get towards knowing God? Well, you start from terminology at one point, or you start from the human intellect studying the human intellect, which is an intellect studying intellectual. Or you can start from some kind of notion of. Of what this. What's going on in the state, how do you do dialectic and how do you put that to. Towards the define. Or maybe there's, you know, various different ways that you could start that. And so eventually I decided that actually it would be more. It would better reflect a Varroes if I also kept. Kept that separate and kept these in different chapters, because that's what he's doing and that's part of reading a Barlows.
- [36:12]
Rabbi Mark Katz
So if a scholar reads your book and they leave with a series of questions because there are so many, what does the next book or the next two books look like building off of your work?
- [36:29]
Professor Yehuda Halpert
Well, I think the best thing to do is to read more. Verily so. And I think that, yes, we need to translate these works into English. We're not. We're pretty far from that still. We still don't have even editions of a lot of these texts from which to do the translations. So there's still a lot. A lot more work to be done. And I think for me personally, I'd be most gratified if somebody read the book and said, wow, there's a lot more to do here and I would really like to understand more. And that would be. That would be great. That would. That would be the ideal. This is really a PI. I know I'm not the first one to write on Averroes. People have been writing on him since he was. He was there. But I still feel like I'm a pioneer in this path. And maybe that's true of everybody who writes on Averroes. That there's something kind of. Is one of these great thinkers. You're always digging up new things.
- [37:22]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Yeah. I'm curious a little more about your personal pathway to Averroes because, you know, you're someone who has very much lived in, let's call it, the Jewish studies world. And when I picked up this book, partly because it's part of a series from Academic Studies Press that is a Jewish studies series, I assumed there would be a lot more Jewish there. It really is a book on Averroes qua Averroes, who he was, how he came up with his thought. It's a book that belongs to. In a library more on an Islamic study shelf than a Jewish study shelf. So how did you end up in this area because you have dealt so much in, in your previous writings, like with standard, you know, cross cultural, cross studies, but standard Jewish studies writing.
- [38:15]
Professor Yehuda Halpert
Well, Harry Austrian Wolfson said, identified two kind of pillars of Jewish thought in the Middle Ages. One of them is Maimonides, that's not so surprising. And the other one is Averroes, and that's more surprising. And he really thought that, well, we can't, there's a lot of things we don't know about Jewish studies without Averroes. And Averroes is not Jewish. That's definitely true. His works were preserved in Hebrew and he's read and he's studied, he's interpreted, he's commented upon by Jewish authors, particularly from the 13th century, 14th, 15th, 16th century, even 17th century. It's extremely important for all of the philosophy that people are doing and all of the science is always filtered through Averroes. Averroes is their primary text. And every time actually people say, oh, this is from Aristotle. Well, not every time, but almost every time they actually mean Averroes. So they say Aristotle in Hebrew. But they, but the text that they have is actually a translation of Averroes. And this is sort of an indication of how much he's really a central figure for Judaism, medieval Judaism in particular. And that's something that is often overlooked and I think that's unfortunate. Yes, this book is about Averroes as a, as a Muslim thinker. But I think if you go back or you look at other people who read these texts, Gersonides is a great example, or Crescas or Narboni, or I mentioned Alemano, Judah, Mess. All of these thinkers are people who are, who are grappling very directly with Averroes. And it's in a way the continuation of the Veroes legacy is actually in these Jewish texts.
- [40:14]
Rabbi Mark Katz
So I think I'm going to end here with just one final question, which is our standard question that we always ask anyone who's on the podcast, which is what's next for you? What are you working on? What are you writing? What are you thinking?
- [40:27]
Professor Yehuda Halpert
Well, I have two projects. One of them is a dialectic project which deal with, I mean, I already have a few articles that I've put out on dialectic and dialogue questions about disputation, for example, and how to understand disputation in light of formal rules of disputation. This is very details about argument, but it does apply to texts that people have heard of in the Jewish studies world, including like the Ramban's account of his the 1263 Barcelona Disputation and how whether or not and to what extent that if that follows sort of Aristotelian dialectical rules and as far as and numerous other ones. So that's one project. And then I have another project I'm hoping to do. And I won't say too much about this, except that it is about Jewish humor. And this has to do with the fact that some of the most important Hebrew translators and students and commentators on actually Averroes and believe it or not, on the metaphysics of Averroes, like Colonymus Ben Kalonymus also wrote humor books when they weren't working on very serious, dense, philosophical stuff. And I'm trying to figure out why. Well, before they do it, were they just relaxing or did they have another goal when they when they turned to this kind of humor? So hopefully I'll have some make some progress with that in the next couple of years. Hopefully less time than this one, which took me 15 years. I'll hopefully get that out sooner than that, but we'll see.
- [42:11]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Well, thank you very much. This has been a fascinating conversation. So the book is Veroes on Pathways to Divine Knowledge, published by Academic Studies Press. We've been in conversation today with Professor Yehuda Halpert. I'm Rabbi Mark Katz, your host, and have a great day.
- [42:28]
Professor Yehuda Halpert
Thank you very much, Rabbi.