The controversial question of the alternative between determinism and free will represents a kind of leitmotif in medieval Jewish philosophy. The advantage of this saying – as some of the most important Jewish Aristotelian thinkers would recognise – is that it overcomes the inconveniences of the extreme positions of strong determinism and strong libertarianism: the former, by denying human freedom, negated the appel of religious tradition to choose good over evil, while the latter, by denying God’s knowledge of details, compromised His perfection. So by keeoung determinism and freedom in a single plexus, the ‘compatibilists’ arrive at the idea that human actions are free, yet ontologically determined, as if freedom were a law of nature to which man is bound.

The Midrash ha-Hokhmah by is the first, and in many ways most interesting, encyclopaedia of the Jewish Middle Ages. In its second part, it comprehends a section on astrology, that is essentially a Jewish reinterpretation of Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos: Judah ha-Cohen states that prayer and, more generally, the observance of the Torah provide Israel with the possibility of removing itself from the law of the stars; as long as there is respect for the Torah, Israel is, in other words, so closely linked to the spiritual world that it may enjoy a higher power than that of the astral.

The recent publication of volumes about Arabic science and philosophy allows us to revisit one of the most fascinating phenomenon of the whole intellectual history – that of translatio studiorum from Athens to Baghdad, and from Baghdad to the Latin West, analyzed here through the particular lens of Avicenna’s metaphysics and psycology and al-Farab¤’s cosmology. The result is a clearer understanding of how Avicennian and Fara- bian thought creatively transformed Greek legacy to estabilish a new paradigm in the his- tory of science and philosophy.

Dagli inizi del XIII secolo fino alla seconda metà del XV secolo, la traduzione si impone come uno dei principali generi letterari nei quali si esercita la filosofia ebraica. Esempio paradigmatico di questo importante fenomeno delle traduzioni è la traduzione in ebraico del De ente et essentia di Tommaso d'Aquino, che fu realizzata da Yehudah Romano nell'ambito di un più ampio progetto – quello di risvegliare gli 'intorpiditi' figli del popolo ebraico attraverso le novità dei colleghi cristiani.