Hasdai Crescas

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Posted by Ethel Jean Saltz on May 06, 19100 at 14:13:10:

Last Thanksgiving a back-East friend mentioned I might be interested in Hasdai Crescas because of my interest in Baruch Spinoza and Galileo Galilei. Well, I've got the Encyc Judaica cdrom. WOW, was he ever right. The best kept Jewish secret, besides Baruch Spinoza, that is. In fact, the last paragraph of the EJ article suggests that Crescas was known by both Galileo and Spinoza. Crescas was over 200 years before them (they were in the same era, and amazingly Spinoza was a telescope lens grinder.)

This is the first evidence I've gotten of even putting Spinoza and Galileo in the same paragraph.

Does any one know if OR ADONAI by Crescas exists? If so, why hasn't it been translated into English? Crescas came to some astonishing conclusions about the physical aspect of the universe (and that's in the days when the sun went around the Earth). He even was a great administrative Jew. His arguments contradicting Aristotle are marvelous. In fact, it should be part of the study of physics.

The article suggested he was going to write a book contradicting RAMBAM. This is not unexpected since RAMBAM was an Aristotelian.

If I've made errors in the previous data, please correct. I'm not a scholar.

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