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    Medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophers hid esoteric tea... — Carmelics
    Home/Religious Experience
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophers hid esoteric teachings within exoteric writings to protect them from the many.

    Natural TheologyReligious Experience
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Human nature is divided between 'the few' capable of understanding philosophy and 'the many' who are not.
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    • 2.Exposure of the many to philosophical truths tends to undermine the authority of revelation and religious-political authority.
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    • 3.Philosophers in these societies had political incentives to conceal their real views.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Leo Strauss's esoteric reading thesis, the primary modern source for this claim, has been critiqued by scholars like Josef Stern and Warren Zev Harvey as over-systematizing ambiguity into intentional concealment.
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    • 2.Medieval commentators in the Islamic and Jewish traditions, including Ibn Rushd's students and Maimonides' immediate interlocutors, generally read these texts as genuine attempts at harmonization, not strategic misdirection.
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    • 3.Attributing hidden atheism or heterodoxy to thinkers requires stronger textual evidence than deliberate obscurity, which is equally explicable by genuine philosophical uncertainty.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Maimonides and Al-Farabi explicitly state their pedagogical methods in their own texts, making concealment a declared hermeneutic rather than hidden esotericism.
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    • 2.A teaching strategy openly announced in a preface cannot coherently function as the covert protection of dangerous truths from the many.
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    Topics

    Religious ExperienceNatural Theology

    Connections

    4 topics

    Social Contract1 linkedDemocracy & Governance1 linkedVirtue Ethics1 linkedSkepticism1 linked

    Related

    A teaching strategy openly announced in a preface cannot coherently function as ...Attributing hidden atheism or heterodoxy to thinkers requires stronger textual e...Exposure of the many to philosophical truths tends to undermine the authority of...Human nature is divided between 'the few' capable of understanding philosophy an...
    +4 moreShow less
    Leo Strauss's esoteric reading thesis, the primary modern source for this claim,...Maimonides and Al-Farabi explicitly state their pedagogical methods in their own...

    Similar

    The plausibility of extreme esotericism in Islamic and Jewish philosop...76%Maimonides and the major trend of Jewish philosophers were wrong to pl...71%Maimonides held that the Torah does not teach anything that philosophy...71%If revelation discloses truths inaccessible to philosophy, philosophy ...70%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: medieval-literary
    View source passageHide passage
    Many late classical and medieval philosophical texts contain esoteric elements. The desire to hide the real message of a text in its earlier forms springs from some form of gnosticism. Gnostic sects, needing to protect their knowledge from dissemination among non-initiates, hid their true message in ways that could only be deciphered by those who possessed the secret knowledge. Leo Strauss makes the additional argument that the motives for esotericism in Jewish and Islamic medieval thinkers are
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Medieval commentators in the Islamic and Jewish traditions, including Ibn Rushd'...
    Philosophers in these societies had political incentives to conceal their real v...
    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit