Jewish Rhetorics by Michael Bernard-Donals Janice W. Fernheimer

Author:Michael Bernard-Donals, Janice W. Fernheimer [Michael Bernard-Donals, Janice W. Fernheimer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781611686418
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
Published: 2014-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

NOTES

1. These details and other biographical information can be found in Sherwin Nuland, Maimonides.

2. For an extensive and highly nuanced discussion of rhetoric in medieval Arabic thought, see Deborah Black, Logic and Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics in Medieval Arabic Philosophy.

3. Ralph Lerner’s Maimonides’ Empire of Light provides another important addition to the study of Maimonides’s rhetoric by focusing on the politics of public instruction as well as the persuasive strategies deployed in the Rambam’s letters. A sampling of the Rambam’s extensive corpus of letters can be found in Twersky’s Maimonides Reader and in Maimonides’s Epistles of Maimonides.

4. We may even find that Twersky’s phrase, “reflective-persuasive communication,” is more descriptive than external or internal rhetorics, challenging us not only to question the extent to which we rely on what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have called the “conceptual metaphor of containment” to frame our “rhetorical understandings” (28, 31). In this essay, I will use the terms “internal rhetoric” and “self-persuasion” more or less interchangeably.

5. The concern of this essay is not Maimonides’s psychology per se. (For a brief overview of Maimonides’s faculty-based psychology, see Isaac Husik, A History of Jewish Medieval Philosophy, 281–82.) Regarding the relationship of faculty psychologies and “internal rhetoric,” see Niencamp, Internal Rhetorics, 43–77.

6. This summary of Maimonides’s general approach may place unwarranted emphasis on the idea of choice. It may be more proper to say that conditions of the soul cause individuals to perform certain actions, as we see in the discussion of “illnesses of the soul”: “The ancients maintained that the soul, like the body, is subject to good health and illness. The soul’s healthful state is due to its condition, and that of its faculties, by which it constantly does what is right, and performs what is proper, while the illness of the soul is occasioned by its condition, and that of its faculties, which results in its constantly doing wrong, and performing actions that are improper” (Twersky, A Maimonides Reader, 366). I cite here a selection provided by Twersky from Joseph Gorfinkle’s English translation of Shmuel ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew translation of Maimonides’s Arabic text. Although Maimonides’s discussion of the soul’s health in “Hilḥot Deot” may focus more on the conditions that prompt certain behaviors than the behaviors themselves, it is fair to say that he is concerned with both: “Just as the wise man is recognized [nicar] through his wisdom [bechochmato] and his temperaments [uvdeotav] and in these, he stands apart from the rest of the people, so, too, he should be [yiheye, will be] recognized [nicar] through his actions [bemaasav]” (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, vol. 5, section 1, page 82).

7. Despite my Aristotelean mode of expression, similar generalizations are made by others who have explored Maimonides’s use of this medical metaphor (in particular, see Alexander Broadie, “Medical Categories in Maimonidean Ethics”). I have skirted the difficult issue of the relation and/or differences between intellectual and moral virtues here, for fear of muddying the waters even further.

8. Broadie (“Medical Categories”) and David Eisenman (“Maimonides’ Philosophic

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