ABSTRACT
Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed had great influence in subsequent schools of Jewish thought as well as medieval Christian philosophy. Theologians were attracted to Maimonides’s effort to locate the God of the Bible within the framework of Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy. Whereas Maimonides tried to harmonize philosophical truth with scripture, Spinoza found the task useless. Instead, Spinoza proposed an interpretative method of strict reliance on historical and linguistic analysis. Spinoza ultimately rejected the Jewish faith and strove to liberate true philosophy from theology and religion. The impact of The Guide extended throughout the medieval world particularly within Jewish rabbinic scholarship. Kenneth Seeskin contends that The Guide does not contain one hidden truth, but offers “a patchwork of doctrines, conjectures and observations dealing with speculative matters.”.
