And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at

www. History of Philosophy. net.

Today's episode, The Great Eagle, Mymonities.

In Judaism there's a saying.

From Moses to Moses, there was no one like Moses. I guess

you won't need me to tell you who the first Moses was. The second Moses is the

subject of today's episode, the rabbi Moses Ben Maum, known in Hebrew with the honorific

acronym Rambam, and known in English usually by his Latinized name, Maimonides.

Whether you call him Moses Rambum or Mymonities, this is a man with some claim to being the most important figure of medieval Judaism.

As we've already seen, Mymonides had predecessors who fused philosophy with Jewish religious

teachings, but none of these predecessors reached Mymonides' importance philosophically, and

none of them attained his standing as a rabbinic scholar.

In short, Mymonities was both the greatest Jewish religious authority of the medieval period and

the greatest Jewish philosopher of the medieval period, perhaps the greatest of all time,

though Spinoza provides some stiff competition.

Mymonides was an almost exact contemporary of the great Aristotelian commentator of Erois.

They died only six years apart and they both hailed from Cordoba.

Mymanides was born in 1138 into the family business, which was Jewish law.

His father, Mymun, was an authoritative legal scholar, which helps to explain how it is that

Mymonides was already able to write vastly learned works on rabbinic law by the time he was in his 20s.

By that time, the family had left Cordoba and transplanted itself to Fez in Morocco.

They seemed to have left Spain in hopes of finding a climate more hospitable to Jews.

...