The book Ahava ba-Ta¢anugim - (Love In delights) was written during the years 1353- 1356 by Rabbi Moses Ben Judah. It is a huge and comprehensive encyclopedia of Aristotelian physics and metaphysics and includes also a substantial theological section. Nevertheless, Ahavah ba-Ta¢anugim is far from being a simple compendium of the Aristotelian sciences and a mere summary of its corpus. Its author discusses and explains each scientific topic in a creative and innovative way. Some of his innovative explanations of matter, atoms, time and motion, have no source in the classical Aristotelian literature and deviate from the whole Aristotelian system. These innovations contributed to the development of sciences of the author's days and they reflect new trends of the study of Aristotle’s philosophy of nature among the 14th-century scholars. These trends paved the ground for modern science that, as modern scholarship observed, did not emerge ex nihilo, but had its roots in the criticism of Aristotelian science in the 14th century.
The current book is a critical edition of the first seven discourses of the first part of the encyclopedia, which deals with physics. Each discourse deals with one scientific topic and includes some biblical commentary chapters that aim to show the harmony between the scientific topic and the Torah and to expose the secrets that were hinted by Ibn Ezra, Maimonides, and Nachmanides in their treatises.
The edition includes an introduction which presents a general overview of the treatise: its period, place and its purpose, its sources and its approach. The introduction also describes and explains the content of the seven discourses presented in the edition and highlights its innovations and main original explanations.
Critical Edition - Introduction and Commentary by Esti Eisenmann.