Yehuda Halper

My research examines medieval and renaissance Jewish philosophy and the dynamic confluence of Arabic, Greek, Latin and Hebrew intellectual traditions, which led to the blossoming of the sciences in medieval Jewish culture and to the reinterpretation of canonical religious texts. My dissertation examined the transmission of one book of Aristotle's Metaphysics from Greek to Arabic to Hebrew, and provided a critical edition of Averroes' influential commentary on it. In articles and lectures following my dissertation, I focus on medieval and renaissance Jewish interpreters of Aristotle's Metaphysics with attention to how they reconcile their interpretations of Aristotle with canonical Jewish ideas of God and the divine. In my current work, I am exploring Socratic notions of open-inquiry and their presentation in medieval Hebrew and Arabic works