Maimonides / Essays
Standalone Essays
Essays that take a single question from Rambam and follow it: Abraham's discovery, the limits of language, the problem of attributes, and constructed dialogues between Maimonides and other thinkers.
Abraham
Essay
Until He Knew — Abraham and the Mishneh Torah
Rambam's account of Abraham's discovery: he did not discover God. He discovered that God is not discoverable. The essay follows what that distinction means for knowledge, faith, and the limits of proof.
Essay
Abraham's Voyage into the Unknown
Abraham as the archetype of the outsider — the person who leaves what is known not because they have found something better, but because the known has become a structure that prevents seeing.
Essay
No Teacher, No One to Tell Him
Rambam says Abraham had no teacher. What does it mean to learn without being taught — and what does the absence of a teacher reveal about the structure of knowledge itself?
Language & Attributes
Essay
Maimonides on God, Language, and Attributes
The language-and-attributes problem in Rambam: how words that describe God can simultaneously reveal and conceal, and why every attribute is both necessary and dangerous.
Essay
Thoughts on Maimonides' Philosophy of Language
What Rambam's treatment of equivocal names reveals about the philosophy of language — and about the moment when shared vocabulary masquerades as shared meaning.
Essay
The Shape That Knows
The knower-known-knowledge unity in Rambam: what it means that knowing, the one who knows, and the thing known are not three things but one structure seen from different angles.
Dialogues
Constructed Dialogue
A Dialogue Between Maimonides and the Buddha
What happens when two thinkers from different worlds examine the same question — the structure of experience and the limits of description — and discover that they are not asking the same question.
Constructed Dialogue
A Dialogue Between an Atheist and Maimonides
A constructed conversation in which an atheist and Rambam discover that their disagreement is not about whether God exists, but about what the word "exists" is being used to do.
Other
Essay
The Two Worlds Within — A Jewish Guide
The two-worlds theme in Rambam: the world as seen through the body and the world as seen through the intellect — and the moment when a person discovers they have been living in both all along.
Essay
Maimonides Did Not Conceive of Progress as We Do
An essay arguing that Rambam did not hold a modern notion of progress — and that this matters for how we read his project today.