ABSTRACT
Rabbi Levi ben Gershom, or Gersonides (1288–1344), is one of the most original medieval Jewish thinkers, whose interests and writings spanned philosophy, biblical exegesis, astronomy, mathematics, natural science, logic and medicine. Like most contemporary Jewish philosophers in southern France, Gersonides wrote in Hebrew and drew almost solely on sources available to him in that language. But since most of these were translations from Arabic, Gersonides can be viewed as an innovative continuer of the Arabic philosophical tradition that had culminated in Ibn Rushd (Averroes), indeed as someone who developed his own philosophical ideas through a critical dialogue mainly with two major thinkers who had written in Arabic: Maimonides and Ibn Rushd, as well as, to a lesser extent, the astronomer al-Biṭrūjī.
