Ben gershon r levi (3 risultati)

paperback. Condizione: Very Good.

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Hardcover. Condizione: Very Good. 1st Edition. In Hebrew. 18 x 14 cm. 40, 27 leaves =134 pages). Some browning and staining. Vinograd 27; Steinschneider 6138, 8 column 1612; Adams I, page 6434, number 605; Zedner page 432; Roest 672. OCLC: Libraries worldwide that own item: 4. Top margin of the title page has a very old Hebrew inscription that is obscured by a line, possibly in Latin, that a later owner intentionally wrote over it. Extracts from each book of the Bible, the ethical, philosophical, and religious teachings that may be gleaned from the text by R. Levi b. Gershom. Levi ben Gershon (Born 1288 in Bagnols-sur-Cèze, Languedoc, France - Died 1344 in Perpignan, France), better known by his Latinised name as Gersonides or the abbreviation of first letters as RaLBaG, was a philosopher, Talmudist, mathematician and astronomer and astrologer. According to Abraham Zacuto and others, he was the son of Gerson ben Solomon Catalan. As in the case of the other medieval Jewish philosophers little is known of his life. His family had been distinguished for piety and exegetical skill in Talmud, but though he was known in the Jewish community for his commentaries on certain books of the Bible, he apparently never accepted any rabbinical post. It has been suggested that his unique opinions may have put obstacles in the way of his preferment. He is known to have been at Avignon and Orange during his life, and is believed to have died in 1344, though Zacuto asserts that he died at Perpignan in 1370. In contrast to the theology held by other Jewish thinkers, Gersonides held that God does not have complete foreknowledge of human acts. Bothered by the old question of how God's foreknowledge is compatible with human freedom, Gersonides holds that what God knows beforehand is all the choices open to each individual. not the choice the individual will make. Gersonides made some remarkable discoveries in the field of astronomy. He was the only astronomer before modern times to have estimated correctly stellar distances. Whereas all other astronomers put the stars on a rotating sphere just beyond the outer planets, Gersonides estimated, correctly, that the distance to the stars was ten billion times greater. Using data he collected from his own observations Gersonides refuted Ptolemy's model. He reviewed Ptolemy's model with its epicycles and realized that it could be checked by measuring the changes in the apparent brightnesses of Mars and looking for cyclical changes along the conjectured epicycles. These thus ceased being dogma, they were a theory that had to be experimentally verified, "a la Popper". Gersonides developed tools for these measurements, essentially pinholes and the camera obscura. The results of his observations did not fit Ptolemy's model at all and so Gersonides concluded that the Ptolemy model was no good, but he was not able to successfully improve on it. That challenge was finally answered by Copernicus three centuries later. Levi also showed that Ptolemy's model for the Lunar orbit, though reproducing correctly the evolution of the Moon's position, fails completely in predicting the apparent sizes of the Moon in its motion. Curiously, his findings had no impact on later generations of astronomers, even though Gersonides' writings were translated and available. Perhaps no other medieval Jewish philosopher has been so maligned over the centuries as Gersonides. Indeed, his major philosophical work, Sefer Milhamot Ha-Shem (The War of the Lord, 1329), was called "Wars against the Lord" by one of his opponents. Despite the vilification of his position, Gersonides emerges as one of the most significant and comprehensive thinkers in the medieval Jewish tradition. He has been constantly quoted (even if only to be criticized), and, through the works of Hasdai Crescas and others, Gersonides' ideas have influenced such thinkers as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Benedict de Spinoza.…