Philosopher
Samuel Ibn Tibbon
c. 1165 – 1232
Also known as Samuel ibn Tibbon
Translator of Maimonides' Guide into Hebrew and maker of Aristotle and Averroes in Hebrew for the first time, who founded Maimonideanism as a movement of philosophical Bible reading.
Samuel Ibn Tibbon was born around 1165 in Lunel, in southern France, the son of Judah Ibn Tibbon, who brought him up in the learned ideals of Islamic Spain: Hebrew, Bible and rabbinic literature, but also Arabic, philosophy and medicine. He preferred philosophy to poetry. He finished his translation of the Guide of the Perplexed in Arles in 1204, travelled twice to Alexandria, and by 1211 had settled in Marseilles, where scholars on their way to the Holy Land came to consult his translation.
He wrote letters to Maimonides, and also translated other works of his. His own writings were especially influential in Provence, which in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was the busiest centre of Jewish philosophy, where much of the classical learning developed in the Islamic world was rendered into Hebrew.
Key ideas
- Philosophy as exegesis
- Ibn Tibbon did not write philosophical summas. His philosophy took the form of commentary on Scripture, moving from the Bible through rabbinic sayings to Maimonides and back, applying the Guide’s methods to verses the Guide had discussed.
- Ecclesiastes read philosophically
- He wrote the first full commentary on Ecclesiastes along Aristotelian and Maimonidean lines, as well as a philosophical-exegetical monograph, Ma’amar Yiqqawu ha-Mayim, and shorter treatises and letters.
- Founder of Maimonideanism
- Through his translations and commentaries he made Maimonides’ thought available in Hebrew, and so founded a movement of philosophical exegesis that shaped Jewish thought in Provence, Italy, Byzantium and Spain for three centuries.
- Tradition
- Jewish
- Region
- Lunel and Marseilles
- Period
- Provence and Spain
Influences
Where these links come from
- Samuel Ibn Tibbon drew on Maimonides. Source: James T. Robinson, Samuel Ibn Tibbon, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Key works
- Guide of the Perplexed (Hebrew translation), 1204
- Commentary on Ecclesiastes
- Ma'amar Yiqqawu ha-Mayim
- Read free at Wikisource (in Hebrew)
Sources
- James T. Robinson, Samuel Ibn Tibbon, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy