On the spirit of justice
After reading your fascinating book The Spirit of Justice (a particularly mesmerizing intellectual and Torah experience), I have two questions, one fundamental and one marginal:
- A bit of a contradiction – but what is the relationship in your opinion between the philosophical framing you make of the words of Maimonides (and the Ramban) and his own intention in the roots? Is this interpretation also a kind of transparent, ideological, revealing view or something more akin to branching out?
- You wrote that the peak of Maimonides’ non-positivism comes in the abolition of the partitions between logic and ontology – in your words, “Not only can we observe facts with the eyes of reason, see the general fact through the particular fact. We can also ‘see’ more obscure types of connections between facts, connections of the kind that positivism does not even recognize as existing (since, according to its method, what is not seen does not exist). The differences between analogy, induction, and deduction, according to Maimonides, are not found only on the logical plane, that is, in our thinking. These differences are found in reality.
The observable itself (the law, in our case)” and added that this concept has implications in the field of philosophy of science. Can the rabbi explain what he means by these implications? How can seeing non-binary logical connections as something with observable reality affect scientific theories?
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0 Answers
1. I have written several times that sometimes a person sees in the words of his rabbi or in a book an idea that the author himself did not think of. This does not necessarily mean that he is wrong. Sometimes the author himself does not fully understand what is implied in his words, for example because he is not sufficiently skilled in philosophical thinking or because my understanding is only a modern formulation of the ancient idea. This is the meaning of Moshe’s midrash in the court of the Rambam. Similarly, Rabbi Kook wrote to Nini Suchtshover about his grandfather, that the Rambam did not say anything that he did not hear from his rabbi, but it is also written that he said things that no ear has ever heard. He heard from his rabbi things that no other ear has ever heard, including his rabbi’s ear. This is not mysticism but a simple experience of every student who studied with a rabbi. Search here for my words on the dispute between the Rebbe of Ash and Rabbi Yehoshua Hutner regarding the Rambam in the Rambam.
2. The implications are for the philosophy of science and not for the scientific theories themselves. The philosophy of science revolves almost entirely around David Hume’s problem of induction. In my opinion, this is the only possible solution to it. I have been at length on this throughout the Quartet and it is truly untenable.
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