Abstract

Although there has never been a shortage of book-length commentaries on Plato's Republic, Descartes's Meditations, or Spinoza's Ethics, the same cannot be said of Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed. A few Hebrew commentaries exist, but they are neither influential nor readily accessible to English-speaking audiences. So while there has been a noticeable resurgence of interest in Maimonides since the publication of Shlomo Pines's English translation in 1963, there is still a respect in which Ivry's book breaks new ground.The reasons for the lack of such a commentary are several. The original text is written in Judeo-Arabic and presupposes advanced knowledge of the Hebrew Bible, rabbinic commentaries on the Bible...