Charles Manekin

University of Maryland, Philosophy, Faculty Member

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Charles H. Manekin (PhD, Columbia) is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland. He specializes in the history of philosophy, specifically medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy. He is also interested in the history of science among Muslims and Jews. The focus of Manekin's research has been Aristotelian and humanist logic in Hebrew, the philosophy of Levi Gersonides, and the free will problem in Jewish philosophy. He has written books on Gersonides and Maimonides and has edited a collection of articles on general and Jewish perspectives on freedom and moral responsibility. He has also edited collections of Jewish philosophy for Routledge and Cambridge. Manekin received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1985), the Yad Hanadiv Foundation (1991-1992), and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture (1999-2000). He was recently awarded a three-year Collaboration Grant from the NEH to prepare a translation and revision of the standard reference work on medieval Hebrew translations from the Arabic and the Latin. The first volume is scheduled to appear in 2013. He has taught at Hebrew University and Ben-Gurion University in Israel, and was a Visiting Senior Lecturer at Bar Ilan University.

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Daniel Davies and Charles H. Manekin, “The Scope of Metaphysics,” in Daniel Frank and Aaron Segal, eds., Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2021), 83-101

Maimonides makes extensive use of metaphysics in the Guide, but he does not discuss the disciplin... more Maimonides makes extensive use of metaphysics in the Guide, but he does not discuss the discipline's nature or many of the basic issues it addresses. Instead, the Guide's readers would need to be familiar with the tradition of metaphysical inquiry that Maimonides draws on, which is that of the peripatetic philosophers. Aristotle's Metaphysics stands at its head, and Maimonides received it mediated through Greek and Arabic commentaries. Among the major Arabic commentators, Al-Farabi is known as "the second teacher," after Aristotle; the titles are accorded them by Avicenna, who credits Al-Farabi with enabling him to understand the Metaphysics. But Al-Farabi states that few understand this book since they approach it with the preconception that metaphysics and theology are equivalent: Many people have the preconceived notion that the point and purpose of this book is to discuss the Creator (may He be glorified and exalted!), the intellect, the soul, and other related topics, and that the science of metaphysics and the science of theology are one and the same thing. Consequently, we find that most people who study it are perplexed and misguided by it, since we find that most of the talk in it is devoid of any such aim.   A number of the points made here about the nature of metaphysics were explained in some detail by Alexander Altmann. Altmann's article (Altmann ) remains essential reading for anybody interested in Maimonides' understanding of metaphysics and the limits of human cognition, as well as the sources on which he drew.  "Among the sciences, there is one that looks into being inasmuch as it is and speculates on the things that belong to being essentially" (quoted in Averroes , ).

Charles Manekin

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