Halper, Yehuda (ed.), The Pursuit of Happiness in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Thought: Studies Dedicated to Steven Harvey
Halper, Yehuda (ed.), The Pursuit of Happiness in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Thought: Studies Dedicated to Steven Harvey (Philosophy in the Abrahamic Traditions of the Middle Ages 1), Turnhout, Brepols, 2021, 432 p.
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1This volume inaugurates a new series published by Brepols, entitled ‘Philosophy in the Abrahamic Traditions of the Middle Ages’. This series aims to promote new insights into philosophical thought in Medieval Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, by publishing studies dedicated to comparing, contrasting, or detecting significant philosophical influences between those traditions. This first book brings together twenty articles written by renowned scholars in their respective fields dedicated to Prof. Steven Harvey, one of the leading contemporary scholars in the field of Jewish and Islamic Medieval philosophy. Prof. Harvey’s contributions to the research on philosophers such as Alfarabi, Ibn Bājja, Averroes, Avicenna, Maimonides, Shem-Tov Falaquera, Gersonides, and others are enormously valuable. While Prof. Harvey has written on several philosophical subjects discussed within the Jewish and Islamic traditions, the pursuit of happiness has been a recurring subject throughout his entire career. Indeed, if one looks at his list of publications—most of them available on academia.edu—, one will find, as Y. Halper and R. Fontaine observe in the introduction, that several of his works deal with happiness or related subjects such as bliss, desire, joy, pleasure, love, friendship, virtues of the soul, moral perfection, etc. Yehuda Halper, the editor, has made a wise choice in selecting happiness as the central theme of this volume.
2The different approaches to happiness within Jewish and Islamic philosophies have a Greek background, especially Aristotelian, since, as is well-known, the so-called eudaimonía is the central topic of the Nicomachean Ethics. As Halper and Fontaine mention, while in the Hebrew and Arabic traditions happiness is conceived in different ways by different people, among the wise there is a certain consensus: happiness consists in attaining an intellectual Good, commonly identified with God. The articles can be grouped in the light of this idea in common. The book starts with three articles dealing with the Greek background of the notion of intellectual happiness. It opens with C. D’Ancona’s contribution, ‘Happiness without Sense-Perception. From Plotinus to the visio beatifica, East and West’, and it is followed by G. Veltri’s ‘Happiness in Jewish-Hellenistic and Rabbinic Thought’ and M. Zonta’s ‘Philosophical Terms for “Happiness” in Languages of Culture in Medieval Near, Middle, and Far East’. D’Ancona masterfully shows the Neoplatonic background of the notion of intellectual happiness in Arabic philosophy and kalām, and in 13th century Latin thinkers. Veltri deals with the Greek notions of happiness and good fortune as they appear in Hellenistic Judaism and Rabbinic literature. Zonta’s contribution is one of the last works he wrote before he passed away in 2017. In my view, Zonta’s linguistic exploration would have been a better choice to open the book. This chapter is brief but introduces the variety of terms used for happiness in languages such as Greek, Latin, Armenian, Georgian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Syriac, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, etc. This chapter could have worked as preparatory for the philosophical depth we find in the extraordinary contributions of D’Ancona and Veltri.
3After these three contributions, there are three works devoted to Alfarabi and Avicenna. ‘Alfarabi on Categories of Existence and Politics’, by C. Butterworth, and ‘Alfarabi’s Directing Attention to the Way of Happiness or the Way out of the Cave’ by T.-A. Druart, are two splendid works written by two excellent scholars who always provide new insights into the philosophy of one of the greatest philosophers of the Islamic context ; these two works are not the exception. The contribution by Y. T. Langermann, ‘Light, Exhilarants, and Healing the Spirit: Some Observations on Avicenna’s Cardiac Drugs’, is a very original paper dealing with the medical aspects of happiness in the light of Avicenna’s treatise on Cardiac Drugs. These three articles are followed by four others focused on Jewish philosophers and/or how they adopted philosophical ideas coming from Muslim philosophers. There are articles on the degrees of certainty according to Maimonides and Ibn Daud (‘On the Certainty of Tradition: Maimonides versus Ibn Daud’, by H. Kasher and A. Malach), on Avicenna’s influence on Maimonides and how he explains the psychological mechanism for achieving the rank of a prophet (‘From Tranquility to Extra Effort: Some Notes on the Introduction and Conclusion of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed’, by D. Xiuyuan), on the relation between Maimonides and his ‘student’ Ibn Jābir regarding the immortality of the soul (‘Maimonides on Joseph Ibn Jābir’s Ultimate Happiness’, by C. Manekin) and, finally, on Maimonides and his commentators (Narboni, Efodi, Crescas, and Shem Ṭob) on the problem of evil (‘“Shun Evil and Do Good”: The Problem of Evil According to Maimonides’ Commentators on Guide III.8-12’, by R. Fontaine).
4We then find four articles on Andalusian philosophers. The first one, by Y. Halper (‘Happiness, Eros, and the Active Intellect’), deals with Averroes’ interpretation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics XII, 7 and the way in which the Commentator describes the ‘erotic intellectual desire’ when defining the relationship between human beings and the active intellect. The second article, by F. Woerther (‘“…donc le bonheur ne réside pas dans le jeu” …’), is focused on Averroes’ interpretation of Nicomachean Ethics X, 6. This chapter is added to Woerther’s contributions to the study of one of Averroes’ least attended commentaries. The third article, by B. Abrahamov (‘Ibn al-‘Arabī’s Theology of Prayer’), deals with how prayer helps to attain spiritual freedom as a kind of happiness. Finally, K. Krause’s piece (‘Meaning Beyond Defining: Averroes’ Dispositio in Thomas Aquinas’s Account to Heavenly Beatitude’) brings up the importance of Averroes in shaping the theological thought of Thomas Aquinas.
5The following four contributions delve into Jewish thinkers and are written by outstanding scholars. In ‘How to “Win the Fulfillment of the Best Life Set by the God’s”: Question Addressed to Plato by Gersonides’, R. Glasner writes a fictional letter in which Gersonides, who has no access to Plato’s dialogues, addresses some questions to the Greek philosopher. In ‘Courage and Death: Aristotle, Aquinas, and Joseph ben Shem Ṭob’, C. M. Neira explores the relationship between courage and happiness in Shem Ṭob’s Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics. In ‘Hasdai Crescas’s Use of the Term “Happiness”’’, W. Z. Harvey shows how, while Crescas embraced the Aristotelian and Farabian term happiness, he argued that true happiness was not essentially intellectual, but consists in the service of God, and the love and adhesion to Him. And in ‘Happiness in Life and after Death in Late Medieval Byzantine Jewish Thought’, D. Schwartz deals with the influence of some aspects of Alfarabi’s doctrine of the intellect on Byzantine Jewish scholars.
6The last two contributions deal with topics beyond the Medieval period. The first one by Y. Y. Melamed, ‘Spinoza and Some of his Medieval Predecessors on the Summum Bonum’, deals with Spinoza’s critical reinterpretation of Aristotle. Mainly the notions of essence and teleology the book closes with an Epilogue by J. Walbridge, ‘Epilogue – The Pure Young Men: Chastity, Euripides, and the Madrasas of Pakistan’, an essay comparing the idea of good life in ancient Athens and modern schools in Pakistan. Finally, the volume provides an updated bibliography of the writings of S. Harvey. Y. Halper has edited a remarkable volume and is an ideal example of what this new series pursues.
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Luis Xavier López-Farjeat, « Halper, Yehuda (ed.), The Pursuit of Happiness in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Thought: Studies Dedicated to Steven Harvey », Revue des sciences religieuses, 99/1-2 | 2025, 263-265.
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Luis Xavier López-Farjeat, « Halper, Yehuda (ed.), The Pursuit of Happiness in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Thought: Studies Dedicated to Steven Harvey », Revue des sciences religieuses [En ligne], 99/1-2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 25 juin 2025, consulté le 08 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rsr/16164 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/1492a
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