Maimonides for Moderns: A Statement of Contemporary Jewish Philosophy

This book aims to construct a contemporary Jewish philosophy that accounts for virtue ethics or, rather, to give Jewish virtue ethics a contemporary language for its expression. Ira Bedzow draws significantly on the work of Moses Maimonides and his religio-philosophical explanation of Jewish ethics. However, Bedzow moves away from various aspects of Maimonides’s Aristotelian biology, physics, metaphysics, and psychology. The objective of the volume is to integrate the normative principles of the Jewish tradition into everyday life. While the book translates Jewish ethics from a medieval, Aristotelian framework into a contemporary one, it also serves as a means for Judaism to continue as a living tradition.