nowhere says that creation did not take place from preexisting matter or in pre-
existing time; creation consisted only of giving form to the world.- Ibn Daud states that he wrote his Exalted Faith in order to defend free will; this
would make a sharp opposition to Ibn Gabirol’s emanationism, in which everything
is a manifestation or even an embodiment of the will of God. In countering this
position, Ibn Daud produces a lengthy exposition of an Aristotelean universe (Sirat,
1985: 142–154). - Gilson (1944: 358); Fakhry (1983: 275, 292). Ibn Rushd’s Incoherence of the
Incoherence, against al-Ghazali, was known in the east; his Aristotle commentaries
were not (Watt, 1985: 119). - When he was sent into exile in 1195, it was to Lucena, the old Jewish intellectual
center (Fakhry, 1983: 272). Was this a deliberate slap on the part of his funda-
mentalist Malikite enemies? - This connection to the Christian philosophers is even more direct in the case of
Ibn Daud, who was the first to bring forth Aristoteleanism as an alternative to
Neoplatonism. Ibn Daud apparently began his intellectual career by collaborating
at Toledo with Gundissalinus on translating the Neoplatonists, Ibn Sina, and
possibly Ibn Gabirol; this intimate familiarity with their texts, as well as with the
Christian demand for idea imports, could then have motivated him to go on to
criticize the Neoplatonist position and put forward Aristotle as an alternative. - One can see the change in the way linguistic lines shifted with the growing
nationalism of the times. Virtually all of the Jewish philosophers wrote in Arabic
up through Ibn Daud and Maimonides. The first step in nationalist reaction was
to translate the Jewish philosophers into Hebrew: Judah ibn Tibbon (49 in Figure
8.5, father of Maimonides’s translator Samuel ibn Tibbon, 56), fled the Almohads
to southern France, and translated Bahya ibn Paquda, Halevi, and Gabirol into
Hebrew (Sirat, 1985: 213). After 1200 the Jews composed their original works in
Hebrew, or occasionally in Latin or a secular European language. - Like most of the historians of world philosophy, I am guilty of slighting the
Byzantine philosophers. The consensus is that they were “scholars and exegetes
rather than creative thinkers” (EP, 1967: 1:436). Kazhdan and Epstein (1985) do
little to upset this judgment. - It is dangerous to draw parallels to our own day, since we lack the perspective of
future generations on what philosophical movements mark important turning
points in the long-run attention space. Imports of French and German philosophies
into the anglophone world have brought local reputations for their importers; the
effects on indigenous creativity remain to be seen. On the side of the exporters,
see Lamont (1987) for evidence that Derrida’s reputation was constructed more
outside France than within its home network.
9. Medieval Christendom
- On the organizational dynamics of the medieval church, see Southern (1970). For
the papacy in the early period, see Morrison (1969: 205–360). On the monasteries,
see Butler (1962); Knowles (1949).
988 •^ Notes to Pages 444–455