Alfred L. Ivry's book presents the reader with two guides to Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed: a paraphrase of the Guide’s chapters and an analysis that includes extended critiques of some of the larger issues that have vexed scholars. Although the author intends the paraphrases “to allow the reader to engage with the Guide directly” and “to present Maimonides' text objectively,” they often reveal the author's interpretations and should be compared carefully with the text of Maimonides. The author refers to other interpretations in the notes. If one adds to these the author's learned textual comments on Shlomo Pines's 1963 English translation, we have a multifaceted commentary on the Guide by a scholar who has spent much of his life studying it.

After some preliminary chapters, chapter 4 takes the reader through Guide 1–68, the chapters interpreting first how Scripture, then the philosophers, describe God. The author does not find Maimonides's theory of negative attributes philosophically compelling, and on one occasion he suggests that Maimonides “would appear to be accommodating the traditional reader” (69). Chapter 5 presents the principles and claims of the Kalam theologians, together with Maimonides's criticisms. Here and elsewhere, where the material is technical, the paraphrases are quite helpful for readers unfamiliar with the philosophical background, as are the references to recent scholarship on Kalam thought, which present a different picture from the one portrayed by Maimonides. Chapter 6 begins with the philosophical premises underlying the Aristotelian proofs for the existence, unity, and incorporeality of God. The author says that Maimonides “begs the question” in tacitly assuming the eternity of the world in his presentation of the third proof for God's existence, but Maimonides himself claims that the philosophers' proofs (including, presumably, the third one) assume the eternity of the world.

Chapters 7–9 take the reader through the Guide’s discussions of creation, prophecy, the account of Ezekiel's chariot, and providence. Regarding prophecy, Maimonides's opinion that non-Mosaic prophecy occurs in a dream and via the intermediacy of “angels” leads the author to conclude that “it could well be thought that Maimonides regards biblical history as essentially an imaginative representation” (130). Maimonides's cryptic exegesis of the account of the chariot in terms of Aristotelian cosmology is explained here so clearly that the reader may wonder why Maimonides made such a fuss about revealing its secrets. The reason, we are told by the author, is political, since “disapproval of his philosophizing could endanger his leadership of the community” (151). Perhaps; but even a philosophically adept student like Joseph could hardly be expected to digest, much less accept, an interpretation of Scripture that had taken Maimonides himself years to work out. Maimonides's esotericism appears to me to be more pedagogical than political in this instance.

Chapter 10 presents Maimonides's views on the rationalization of the commandments in Guide 26–50. Maimonides's conception of God's accommodating the commandments to the spiritual level of the Israelites reveals his own “critical attitude” to many of the rituals associated with the temple cult. While “he believes in the contemporary relevance for the individual and the community of its hallowed rituals” (233), Maimonides is portrayed by the author in a strikingly modern fashion as holding that “the rituals of Jewish life also play a critical role in maintaining group loyalty” (201). Chapter 11 presents the last three chapters of the Guide and affirms that despite Maimonides's emphasis on the limitations of human knowledge, true knowledge, intellectual perfection, and immortality are attainable, not just by the greatest thinkers, but by a range of people who have acquired eternal truths during their lifetime. The author argues forcefully and convincingly against recent skeptical and proto-Kantian readings of Maimonides, and ends with a conclusion that weaves together some of the main themes of his commentary.

Promising his readers an “unapologetic presentation of [Maimonides's] views,” the author depicts Maimonides as “torn in his loyalties between philosophy and theology.” While others portray the Guide as a “finished product … of nearly immaculate perfection” the author sees it as a “spiritual biography,” a record of Maimonides's search for truth and his attempt “to form a coherent philosophy out of disparate traditions and schools of thought” (xi), and “to resolve a conflict between faith and reason that had been festering in his soul for some time” (225). Based on the author's analyses, Maimonides does not succeed in this endeavor. In doctrine after doctrine, the author considers Maimonides's solutions to be philosophically inadequate, or to differ little from those Aristotelian doctrines he criticizes, or to be advanced for apologetic or political reasons. If Maimonides believed that he had crafted philosophically respectable alternatives to the Aristotelians on the questions of creation, providence, God's knowledge, prophecy, etc., he was mistaken.

Take Maimonides's doctrine of voluntary creation, for example. According to the author, “… Maimonides' creationist scenario turns out to be as necessitated as is Aristotle's, God's actions equally ‘constrained’ by His nature. As a God of goodness and creator of all possible being, He had to create a world. His wisdom and his will dictated it.… [God's] choice is free only in the sense that it is not compelled by anything outside of God's essence” (240). In other words, Maimonides's philosophical alternative boils down to the very position he opposes. The same is true inter alia for providence (164), prophecy (137), divine knowledge of particulars (182), and Mosaic prophecy (232). The medieval reading of Maimonides as a thoroughgoing Aristotelian (either deliberate or malgré lui) is in full force in these places.

At times the author suggests that the struggle between loyalty to philosophy and to more traditional theology took place within Maimonides himself. Maimonides seems genuinely to want a God who freely creates, but his philosophical proposals don't pass muster. One could conclude that Maimonides was simply out of his depth, or that his project amounted to a heroic attempt to square the circle. However the author sometimes suggests that Maimonides was aware of his difficulties, and presented his views in more theologically acceptable terms for various political or apologetic reasons.

Religious philosophers are often criticized by traditionalists as insufficiently religious and by less religious philosophers as insufficiently philosophical. Judged by the standards of medieval Aristotelianism, Maimonides's solutions to the questions of creation, providence, and prophecy are unsatisfactory. This is hardly surprising, given that he presents them as deviations from the Aristotelians. Maimonides's solutions are better viewed, in my opinion, as halting attempts to move beyond the Aristotelians in directions yet unknown. Maimonides's conception of a God who creates the world by particularizing some possibilities and leaving unactualized others seems dangerously close to the Kalam view that he rejects. It is incoherent within a strict Aristotelian framework, as the author shows (178, 181). But given a somewhat different understanding of possibility, Maimonides's conception foreshadows Leibniz's view of a God who chooses freely out of his goodness the best of all possible worlds, a view that dominated German philosophy for a century until Kant. Like Aquinas, Maimonides exempts God from the classical principle of plenitude for theological reasons while endeavoring to remain as much as he can within an Aristotelian framework. He is quite aware of his (and the human) inability to solve certain thorny issues, and he does his best to render this inability philosophically respectable. But the theologically motivated deviations of Maimonides and Aquinas should not be criticized on philosophical grounds, unless the only philosophical game in town is that of the Arabic Aristotelians.

Some fourteenth-century Jewish thinkers read Maimonides as secretly professing Aristotelian views (e.g., Narboni), or as inconsistent and constrained by theological considerations (e.g., Gersonides). The present thought-provoking and challenging commentary, the first of its kind in English, follows in the paths of these distinguished predecessors. Readers of the Guide will be grateful for it.