Many people are mistakenly convinced that the Jewish holiday of Chanukah celebrates the victory of the Jewish religion over Hellenism and that the enemy was Greece. Neither supposed fact is true. The Jews in Judea, Egypt and other countries of the diaspora had a longstanding favorable relationship with the Greeks and Hellenism well before and [...]
I bought a statue of the famed philosopher Aristotle. It is covered in heavy bronze. It is 14.25 inches tall. It looks great. I placed it next to the Maimonides books that I wrote because Aristotle (384-322 BCE) and Maimonides (1138-1204 CE) are my favorite philosophers. Both are rationalists. Socrates taught Plato, Plato taught [...]
The following is the second chapter from my third book on Maimonides called "Maimonides: Reason Above All." I gave my book this name because both he and Aristotle were convinced that the most important part of humans is their ability to reason, something most humans do not do. [...]
Beha’alotcha Maimonides vs. Aristotle on the Golden Mean[1] Numbers 12:3 informs us that “the man Moses was very humble, more than any person on the face of the earth.” Midrash Sifrei elaborates: although Moses’s humility did not hinder him from confronting Pharaoh and demanding the release of the Israelites from the [...]
The Seventh Letter By Plato Forgotten Books, 2008, 38 pages ISBN 978-1606200131 Cost: $5.59 Scholars disagreed whether Plato wrote this short book, but the consensus today is that he or one of his close students did write this very revealing book. Plato (428/427-348/347 BCE) was one of the world’s greatest philosophers. He was [...]
By Israel Drazin Philosophers and thinkers generally reject many religious concepts. There is no religious concept more anathema to them than grace. Grace is commonly understood as God’s free unearned love given generously by a loving deity. It is unearned for there is nothing that people can do to merit God’s [...]
By Israel Drazin The popular concept today is that there is a “soul,” a person’s personality that is separate from the body, survives the body’s death, and lives on for eternity. While accepted as axiomatic by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, is not in the Hebrew Bible. The idea was taken from ancient pagan [...]
By Israel Drazin A very knowledgeable reader of my writings wrote to me asking two questions. The first was: do I think religious people should study philosophy or science? The question was prompted by my use of the word philosophy frequently. I understand that the great Greek and Jewish philosophers Aristotle [...]
By Israel Drazin In my discussion on “Are intelligent people moral,” I wrote that Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) taught in his Guide of the Perplexed 1:2 that people should work to develop their thinking and understanding by studying the sciences and logic, and make life decisions based on what they learnt, on [...]
By Israel Drazin I don’t think that people need to believe that a soul exists. The currently-used Hebrew word for soul is nefesh. Nefesh is in the Torah, but it does not mean soul in Scripture. It means “a person” or “life force.” Thus when Leviticus 2:1 speaks of a nefesh bringing an [...]
