ABSTRACT
Moses Maimonides was a preeminent Jewish philosopher among Jews, Muslims and Christians of the Middle Ages, and his Mishneh Torah remains among the most authoritative codifications of Jewish law and ethics. In broad outlines, Maimonides view of evil falls squarely within the Neoplatonized Aristotelianism prevalent in his day. Maimonides position on the metaphysics of evil is also a variant on Neoplatonism, which maintains that evil is a privation that has no positive reality of its own. As Maimonides discussion of providence indicates, there were people in the Middle Ages who did think that God is aware of everything that is the case because everything happens in accordance with God's will: chiefly the Asharites, a subset of the Islamic Kalam. Simply put: the moral of the story is that by gaining knowledge, one adopts a higher, broader view of the human condition and with it a new understanding of what is important.
