- Lived:
- 882–942 · born in Fayyum, Egypt; died in Sura, near Baghdad
- Tradition:
- Jewish rationalist theology — the founder of medieval Jewish philosophy
- The Big Idea:
- Reason and revelation are two roads to the same truth — and a tradition worth keeping is one that can prove, in open argument, why it deserves to be trusted.
- In their words:
- "I saw men sunk, as it were, in a sea of doubt and covered by the waters of confusion, and there was no diver to bring them up from the depths and no swimmer to come to their rescue."
- If you remember one thing:
- He was the first thinker in nine hundred years to build Judaism a philosophy — because Baghdad's marketplace of arguments made it impossible not to.