Philosophic Mysticism: Studies in Rational Religion David R. Blumenthal "Can a philosopher be a mystic?" Classical scholarship on medieval Jewish thought answered this question, with few exceptions, in the negative. This book, a collection of essays written over a forty-year period by David R. Blumenthal, offers a forceful positive answer - that philosophy was the penultimate step to post-philosophic, post intellectual, post cognitive religious experience and, conversely, that philosophic mystical experience was quintessentially philosophic in its preliminary stages and in its tone and quality. Calling on linguistic and cultural evidence, Blumenthal argues that even Maimonides, the towering figure of medieval Jewish philosophy, was a philosophic mystic. The argument presented in this book, especially its application to Maimonides, should change the way scholars think about both medieval philosophy and mysticism. David R. Blumenthal is the Jay and Leslie Cohen Professor of Judaic Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Blumenthal wrote his thesis with the late Georges Vajda of the Sorbonne, and then began his career by publishing the first theological works in English form post-Maimonidean Yemen. He broadened this work in a series of essays, in which he developed and applied the concept of philosophic mysticism to Maimonides. This book culminates that work. Expanding his interest into the modern period, Blumenthal wrote three works of modern Jewish theology and ethics: God at the Center: Meditations on Jewish Spirituality (1988, also available in French), Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest (1993), and The Banality of Good and Evil: Moral Lessons form the Shoah and Jewish Tradition (1999)