Judaic Studies Program and the Council on Middle East Studies present:
Carlos Fraenkel, McGill University: “Metaphysics, Skepticism, and Sufism in al-Ghazâlî, Maimonides, and Abraham ben Maimonides”
In this lecture I propose a solution to the puzzle of why Abraham, the son of Maimonides, staunchly defends his father’s intellectual legacy against critics in the West and in the East and presents himself as his intellectual heir while at the same time strikingly departing from this legacy: whereas Maimonides interprets Judaism as a philosophical religion, Abraham sets forth a Sufi interpretation. I’ll use al-Ghazâlî’s account of the relationship between falsafa and Sufism as a model to explain the relationship between father and son. Both al-Ghazâlî and Maimonides are metaphysical skeptics–i.e., hold that reason cannot conclusively settle metaphysical questions. But in contrast to al-Ghazâlî and Abraham, Maimonides does not try to overcome skepticism through the Sufi path to God. So Abraham’s departure from Maimonides turns out to be (at least in part) an attempt to solve a specific epistemological problem.