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

W.W. history of philosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview. History of Philosophy

philosophy.

Today's episode will be an interview with Sarah Strumsa who is professor of Arabic studies and Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Hi Sarah, thanks for coming on.

Hi.

We're going to be talking about Mymonides, who is a thinker you've published about, and in fact in

2009 you wrote a book or published a book called Mymonides in his world portrait of a Mediterranean

thinker and obviously Mymonities lived in various places around the Mediterranean. So in that sense he's a Mediterranean

thinker. He lived in Andalusia. He lived in Palestine, lived in Cairo. But before we even

get into talking about him, to what extent can we actually talk about a Mediterranean culture at this point in history?

Well, rather than speaking about Mediterranean culture culture which sounds like one single unit and of course this is not something that existed at this point, but we can speak about common denominators and there were very strong common denominators for large part of the Mediterranean and the adjacent cultures.

There was one for large part of the Mediterranean, there was one for a large part of the Mediterranean there was one lingua franca which was Arabic

It was used by Jews Muslims and Christians and it served as a basis for culture and cultural transmission.

There was in various garbs and various manifestations there was one ruling religion which was Islam, Shiite Islam, Sunni Islam, but

Islam was ruling most parts of large parts of the southern Mediterranean and these two things created a basis for

cultural exchange that are unprecedented really very very different from the culture that we can see in

Latin in the Latin West or even with the English as a common language today.

And I suppose that what my monodies did, namely traveling around living at different places

within the Islamic dominated sphere around not an uncommon thing for people to do at this time

is that right?

Not at all especially for merchants and it's not just around the Mediterranean, the Mediterranean culture in that way reached as far as India and Ceylon,

...