Abstract
Contemporary students of philosophical texts of late Antiquity and the Middle Ages share one overall concern. They usually center on one question, how were faith and reason harmonized there? They rightly assume that, ever since Philo Judeus, the major self-imposed task of diverse philosophers of late antiquity and the Middle Ages concerned the rational attitude to faith (in one or the other of the three leading western religions and regarding any aspect of it, dogma, practice or anything else): it was the effort to bring faith into harmony with reason — to harmonize the particular with the universal. (A famous treatise of Averroes is Harmony of Religion and Philosophy. See Davidson, 1992, 348). Historians of philosophy ignore as much as possible those who deem religion prior and superior to reason, calling them mere theologians, not philosophers, since, by definition, philosophy seeks the universal. So the attribution to religious philosophers of the desire to rationalize faith is more of a historical demarcation than a historical statement: we call philosophers those who wished to follow the dictates of reason.
I am grateful to Joel L. Kraemer for his thoughtful, careful, and very useful comments.
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Agassi, J. (2000). Maimonides in Context. In: Cohen, R.S., Levine, H. (eds) Maimonides and the Sciences. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 211. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2128-8_2
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