Jewish Philosophy (Maimonidean)

Time is finite and substantival — created ex nihilo by God as the measure of the created world’s change and motion. Maimonides explicitly argues against the Aristotelian eternity of the world: time had a beginning and will have an end appointed by God. Time is continuous, linear, and uni-directional: history moves from creation through revelation toward messianic fulfillment. Human freedom is genuine — Maimonides insists on free will as a cornerstone of the Torah’s moral framework, even while acknowledging the philosophical difficulty of reconciling it with divine omniscience.

Space is finite, substantival, and flat — created by God as the arena of physical existence. It is local: bodies interact through contiguous contact and spatially mediated forces. Maimonides follows Aristotle in treating space as bounded by the outermost celestial sphere, beyond which there is neither void nor place. The physical cosmos is a finite, ordered whole whose structure reflects divine wisdom.

Matter is finite, substantival, and created ex nihilo — God brought it into existence from absolute nothing, not from pre-existing material. This is the decisive break with both Aristotelian eternalism and Kabbalistic emanationism. Matter is conserved within the created order: once brought into being, the physical substrate persists through all natural transformations. It is local: material substances occupy determinate places and interact through physical proximity.

The human observer is a rational soul embodied in a mortal frame, occupying a single moment and a single place. Knowledge begins in sense perception but reaches its perfection through intellectual apprehension of universals and, ultimately, of the divine. Maimonides holds that the Active Intellect — the last of the separate intellects emanating from God — illuminates the human mind, enabling it to grasp necessary truths. Knowledge, once genuinely acquired by the intellect, is retained permanently; the rational soul carries its intellectual perfections beyond death. Physicality is both: during life the observer is fully embodied, but Maimonides’s philosophical works suggest that the perfected intellect survives the body’s dissolution (the Mishneh Torah also affirms bodily resurrection, creating a famous tension). Agency is active: the observer must cultivate intellectual and moral virtue through sustained rational effort; no one is perfected passively. Multiple observers share a common created world and can verify each other’s findings through reason and demonstration.

Energy is finite, substantival, and created ex nihilo along with matter, time, and space. It is part of God’s created order, governed by the natural regularities that Maimonides identifies with divine wisdom. Conservation holds: the physical world operates according to stable, intelligible laws that preserve its fundamental quantities. Dispersibility is irreversible: natural processes move in one direction; the created order tends toward its appointed end under divine governance, and no natural power reverses the course of physical change.

Information is substantival — God’s knowledge is a real, ontological feature of reality, identical with God’s essence (Maimonides insists that in God, knower, knowledge, and known are one). Human knowledge participates in this divine information through the Active Intellect. Information is conserved: genuine intellectual truths, once apprehended, are eternal and indestructible. The Torah and the philosophical sciences are complementary repositories of the same fundamental truths about reality.