ABSTRACT
Maimonides mentions experience only once in his Arabic Treatise on the Art of Logic, but he appears there to include the results of experience among premises that are certain. This view of experience does not fit the cautious attitude Maimonides takes toward experience in his medical writings. When the Treatise was translated into Hebrew, the translator used language that did not distinguish between truth and certainty, leaving the status of the results of experience unclear. Although later Hebrew translators used terminology clarifying that such results were certain, it was the first translation that became the most studied text and gave rise to a Hebrew commentary tradition. Four of these commentaries explained why the results of experience are true, or can be true, but they differed significantly in accounting for why they are true. This chapter traces how a single remark was read, translated, and interpreted. Its different readings and interpretations offer a glimpse into four hundred years of different views on how to incorporate experience into an Aristotelian syllogistic framework.
