Ramban doctor

Famous jewish scholar

Born in Bagnols, Gersonides lived most of his life in Orange and Avignon. Little else is known about him other than where he resided in Provence under the protection of the popes. Gersonides says almost nothing about his personal life, but some scholars have speculated that he may have functioned as a community rabbi, as a banker, or both.

Of those rabbis who based their religious thought on the philosophy of Aristotle, Gersonides is the most thorough and rigorous; his major work in this area is The Wars of the Lord Gersonides also dealt with rabbinics, philosophy, mathematics, medicine, and astronomy. In medicine he is known to have written a remedy for the gout. In mathematics he composed a treatise on algebra and a commentary on parts of Euclid's Elements.

Finally, Gersonides published a major treatise on astronomy , which Moritz Steinschneider identified as Sefer Tekhunah , which consists of chapters. A summary of this more detailed work is contained in the second part of the fifth book of The Wars of the Lord. What is of particular interest to historians of science is that the work contains significant modifications of the systems of Ptolemy and al-Bitruji, as well as useful astronomical tables.

The work was praised and extensively quoted by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in his Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem In general Gersonides' instrument is considered the most useful tool developed to assist measurements in astronomy prior to the development of the telescope, and historians of science regard Gersonides as one of the most important European astronomers before Galileo.

The Wars of the Lord deals only with those questions that Maimonides either resolved in direct opposition to Aristotelian principles or explained so obscurely that Maimonides' own view cannot be determined. These questions are discussed in six treatises on, successively, the nature of the soul i. In each treatise, every question is systematically discussed.