King Solomon, Rabbi Akiva, and Aristotle? Joseph Ibn Kaspi's philosophical biblical commentaries.

Joseph Ibn Kaspi, born in Provence, lived approximately between 1280 and 1345 and wrote in Hebrew. He authored commentaries on the Bible and on books by medieval writers like Abarham ibn Ezra and Moses Maimonides, produced epitomes of works by Plato and Aristotle, and composed philosophical and theological treatises on various topics. These writings constitute significant contributions to Jewish thought, and they were seriously (if sometimes critically) engaged with and written about by Ibn Kaspi’s contemporaries. Despite this fact, Ibn Kaspi’s readership has gradually waned, and his influence on philosophical discussions, especially concerning the philosophy of Aristotle, which Ibn Kaspi aligned himself with and dedicated much of his thought to interpreting, has not been as pervasive as it could have been. This talk will assess explanations scholars have given to that trajectory, and explore the unwavering commitment to Aristotle’s philosophy in Ibn Kaspi’s biblical commentaries and the impact it had on the reception of these works in the fourteenth century and beyond.
The speaker is Professor Mor Segev from the University of South Florida and currently Visiting Fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London. He is the author of Aristotle on Religion ( 2017), The Value of the World and of Oneself: Philosophical Optimism and Pessimism from Aristotle to Modernity (2022), and articles on various topics in the history of philosophy.