Isaac ben Solomon Israeli

ISAAC BEN SOLOMON ISRAELI. - Jewish philosopher, b. in Egypt ca. 865, d. at Tunis ca. 955. He practiced medicine at the court of the caliphs of Qayrawān.

A capable physician and a mere compiler as a philosopher: such, roughly, was the judgment of the physician-philosopher Maimonides in his time, and of E. Gilson in our own day. The Hebrew-biblical element in I.'s thought is submerged by the influence of Neoplatonism, which sometimes blends with Aristotelian elements. His merit consists chiefly in having given the first impulse to Jewish philosophical studies, which afterward were strongly influenced by Arabic philosophical inquiry. His works (The Book of Definitions; The Book of the Elements; The Book of the Spirit and the Soul) present a mixture of medical, physical and philosophical speculations, which reveal "a mind more curious than systematic and original" (Gilson).

I. admits the idea of creation and draws a clear distinction between God's creative act ex nihilo and natural generation, which proceeds upon a substrate already existing. Creation reveals God's goodness and wisdom. As for prophecy: revelation in sensible form is due to the nature of the organs of reception; revelation in dreams is half corporeal and half spiritual. If, moreover, in the prophetic writings now the spiritual form and now the sensible form occurs, this is due to the intention of adapting the prophet's word to the understanding of the different classes of readers.

Eugenio Zolli