Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, Volume 1

by Harry Austryn Wolfson, Isadore Twersky (Editor), George H. Williams (Editor)

Readers familiar with the luminous scholarly contributions of Harry Austryn Wolfson will welcome this rich collection of essays that have been previously published in widely dispersed journals and books, The articles range over Aristotle and Plato; Philo; the Church Fathers; and Arabic, Jewish, and Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages: Averroes and Avicenna, Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas. The twenty-eight pieces are arranged in such a manner that ideas develop and are pursued from one article to the next, forming a coherent whole. According to the editors, "This volume reflects the most basic biographical fact about Wolfson: his life has been one of unflagging commitment, uninterrupted creativity, and truly remarkable achievement...Wolfson's scholarship will be viewed with awe and admiration and his impact will be durable. He has added new dimensions to philosophical scholarship and illuminated wide areas of religious thought, plotting the terrain, blazing trails, and erecting guideposts for scores of younger scholars."

648 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Harry Austryn Wolfson was a scholar, philosopher, and historian at Harvard University, the first chairman of a Judaic Studies Center in the United States. He is best known for his seminal work on the Jewish philosopher Philo, but was the author of an astonishing variety and quantity of other works on Crescas, Maimonides, Averroes, Spinoza, the Kalam, the Church Fathers, and the foundations of Western religion. His greatest contribution may therefore have been in collapsing all the artificial barriers that isolated the study of Christian philosophy from Islamic philosophy from Jewish philosophy (Twersky 1975). Being the first Judaica scholar to progress through an entire career at a top-tier university (Mendes-Flohr 1998), in Wolfson is also represented the fulfillment of the goals of the 19th-century Wissenschaft des Judentums movement.