Jewish and Islamic Philosophy: Crosspollinations in the Classic Age

Lenn E. Goodman is an American philosopher. His philosophy, particularly his constructive work, draws from classical and medieval sources as well as religious texts. Goodman is also an academic, scholar, and a historian with research interest in metaphysics, ethics, and Jewish philosophy.

Preface
Abbreviations and short titles

1. Crosspollinations

Lenn E. Goodman, one of the world's most elegant and prolific students of medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy, argues convincingly that the reason that Jewish authors found so much of Islamic philosophy, pietism, mysticism, jurisprudence and grammar congenial was that Islamic ideas in these fields were rooted in Biblical categories . . . sharpened by Greek analysis [and] rendered vivid by Greek imagery. . . . At its best Goodman's work remains one of that of the Tosafists: an attempt to derive from painstaking textual analysis a glimpse of the broader principles informing these texts. Goodman is a master of rising from details to ever higher levels of abstraction and it is at the highest levels of abstraction that Greek, Muslim, and Jewish thought meet.

Goodman's nearly poetic writing is vivid and accessible beyond narrow professional confines. . . . This work argues forcefully that cross-pollination not only afforded freshness and strengths to the giants of Islamic and Jewish philosophy in 11th and 12th-century Spain, but that it offers the same to us today. Recommended.

Professor Lenn E. Goodman is a philosopher and scholar of world-class stature, whose writings have enhanced the intellectual lives of all who work in his field.

He is without doubt one of the outstanding authors in his field.