Please join us Wednesday, October 7, for another History of Philosophy Works-in-Progress Luncheon! Our speaker for this event will be Tzvi Schoenberg, Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Medieval Institute, who will speak on the topic of "Ṭevaʾ Maṭbiʿa, Ṭeva Muṭbaʿ: Nature as a Theological Concept in Thirteenth-Century Hebrew Sources."
Each meeting consists of a presentation by a graduate student, faculty member, or visitor on a project that they are working on in the history of philosophy, followed by a period of comments/questions from other participants. The workshop is designed to give contributors the opportunity to develop ideas and receive helpful feedback on projects/papers in a friendly and low stakes environment.
Lunch is provided for registered attendees (to ensure we order enough lunches, please register by noon on the Monday of the presentation).
Abstract: Nature (Heb. ṭevaʿ) appears as an active cosmological principle in Jewish philosophical and theological sources from the tenth century. In the thirteenth century, drawing in part on Maimonidean and other medieval Aristotelian sources, Jewish thinkers increasingly cast Nature as a comprehensive principle that sustains the created order as a unified and intelligible whole. This conception figures prominently in Kabbalistic sources from the 1270s, where Nature is formulated through the verbal forms maṭbiʿa (active) and muṭbaʿ (passive), denoting the interplay between active and passive aspects of reality. Focusing on the early works of Joseph Giqatilla, the paper examines how Kabbalists appropriated the concept of motion and extended it to function as the primary principle of all that exists. It proposes that maṭbiʿa is construed in these texts as the creative power that sustains the created order through motion.
Originally published at historyofphilosophy.nd.edu.