On the Importance of the World: Phenomenology in Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed*
The Journal of Religion March 21, 2019 Martin Shuster 1 citation
The essay argues that Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed contains a kind of phenomenology centered on the ontological category of world. Rather than engaging standard debates, it examines how the text investigates not the existence of particular beings but the possibility of any being at all—the conditions under which anything first appears and a world of objects becomes possible. The guiding question is taken from Thoreau's Walden: why precisely these objects make a world. The essay stresses the importance of this ontological inquiry in Maimonides's work.