RT Article
T1 A Philosopher-Prophet or an Angel? A Skeptical Reading of Isaac Albalag’s Theory of Prophecy
JF The Jewish quarterly review
VO 112
IS 4
SP 670
OP 696
A1 Abdalla, Bakinaz
LA English
YR 2022
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1824115288
AB In his Sefer tikun ha-de‘ot, the thirteenth-century Jewish philosopher Isaac Albalag advocates the double truth doctrine, according to which the truth of philosophy and the truth of religion are contradictory yet simultaneously true. To support this doctrine, Albalag offers an unusual conception of prophecy that links prophets to a suprarational mode of apprehension and a domain of reality that contradicts demonstrative truth. Both doctrines clash with the Tikun’s visible Aristotelianism. In this paper, I argue that the double truth doctrine is not an actual dogma, but rather, serves a mere rhetorical-practical purpose. I analyze Albalag’s skeptical critiques of the limitation of the human intellect, showing how these eventually lead to the conclusion that the state of prophecy that lies at the heart of the double truth doctrine is unachievable.
K1 Isaac Albalag medieval Jewish philosophy
K1 Al-Ghazali
K1 Averoes
K1 Conjunction
K1 intellectual perfection
K1 Skepticism
K1 Philosophy
K1 Religion
K1 Contradiction
K1 Truth
K1 Prophecy
DO 10.1353/jqr.2022.0032