Maimonides for Moderns

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vi

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Ira Bedzow

   Pages 1-12

3. Teleology: One of Aspiration and Not Actualization

   • Ira Bedzow

   Pages 13-45

4. Telos: To Be a Servant of God

   • Ira Bedzow

   Pages 47-87

5. Entelechy: Shlemut

   • Ira Bedzow

   Pages 89-102

6. The Law

   • Ira Bedzow

   Pages 103-118

7. A Contemporary Explanation of the Law’s Construction of Reality

   • Ira Bedzow

   Pages 119-147

8. Practical Reason

   • Ira Bedzow

   Pages 149-208

9. The Virtues

   • Ira Bedzow

   Pages 209-259

10. Moral Motivation and Shlemut

    • Ira Bedzow

    Pages 261-292

11. Back Matter

    Pages 293-350

    PDF

This book aims to construct a contemporary Jewish philosophy that accounts for virtue ethics or, rather, to give Jewish virtue ethics a contemporary language for its expression. Ira Bedzow draws significantly on the work of Moses Maimonides and his religio-philosophical explanation of Jewish ethics. However, Bedzow moves away from various aspects of Maimonides’s Aristotelian biology, physics, metaphysics, and psychology. The objective of the volume is to integrate the normative principles of the Jewish tradition into everyday life. While the book translates Jewish ethics from a medieval, Aristotelian framework into a contemporary one, it also serves as a means for Judaism to continue as a living tradition.  

• maimonides
• jewish studies
• judaic studies
• moses
• judaism
• soloveichik

• New York Medical College, White Plains, USA

  Ira Bedzow

Ira Bedzow is the director of the Biomedical Ethics and Humanities Program at New York Medical College, USA, and the Senior Scholar of the Aspen Center for Social Values.  Bedzow received his PhD from Emory University, USA. He is also an Orthodox rabbi (yoreh yoreh and yadin yadin).  

Policies and ethics