Crosspollinations: Philosophically Fruitful Interactions between Jewish and Islamic Philosophy

As a philosopher and scholar of Jewish and Islamic philosophy, Lenn E. Goodman is the author of twelve books and more than a hundred articles, chapters, and reviews. His most recent book is a study in comparative philosophy entitled Jewish and Islamic Philosophy: Crosspollinations in the Classic Age (Edinburgh University Press and Rutgers University Press, Sept. 1999). A winner of the Baumgardt Prize of the American Philosophical Association, Goodman has lectured throughout the United States and in Europe and the Middle East. His books include Avicenna (Routledge, 1992), On Justice (Yale University Press, 1991), and God of Abraham (Oxford University Press, 1996), which won the Gratz Centennial prize in 1997. Goodman’s scholarship, including translations and commentaries on key Jewish texts and Islamic classics, has been called “erudite, instructive, and enormously wide ranging.” Goodman is a graduate of Harvard University and received his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall scholar. Before coming to Vanderbilt in 1994, Goodman taught philosophy at the University of Hawaii for 25 years.

This lecture focuses on three thoughts that passed from Biblical and Qur’anic scripture and Greek philosophical dialogues, treatises, and commentaries to Muslim and Jewish philosophers: (1) that the seemingly ineffable content of religious experience can be articulated through symbols and so made a social reality, as imagery, ritual, myth, and law; (2) the idea that since man is made in the image of God, people can learn about God by studying humanity; and (3) the belief that God executes justice in history by visiting upon us the consequences of our actions, individually and communally. These are Biblical theses, or would be if the Torah spoke in these rather than tableaux, vignettes, narratives and norms. They are also theses of Plato, taken up and rendered more conceptual and less mythic in articulation by Aristotle’s way of translating Plato’s poetry into prose. They are preserved and deepened in the Neoplatonic synthesis of Aristotelian and Platonic thinking that forms the mainstream of medieval Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought. Examining the dialogue that eddies around these themes scholars find a curious collaboration, surmounting the barriers of time, language, and confession. In each case a profound humanism is embedded in the core idea that is philosophically articulated and tested in the crossfire of dialectic, to grow progressively more critical. The Qur’an mediates here between the Torah and kalam (Arabic dialectical theology). The work of the falasifa, the Greek-inspired philosophers of Islam, similarly mediates between kalam and the Jewish philosophers. The play is from Tinker to Evers to Chance but returns to Tinker with a new conceptual speed and spin.