Harry Austryn Wolfson (November 2, 1887–September 20, 1974) was a scholar, philosopher, and historian at Harvard University, the first chairman of a Judaic Studies Center in the United States. He is best known for his seminal work on the Jewish philosopher Philo, but was the author of an astonishing variety and quantity of other works on Crescas, Maimonides, Averroes, Spinoza, the Kalam, the Church Fathers, and the foundations of Western religion. His greatest contribution may therefore have been in collapsing all the artificial barriers that isolated the study of Christian philosophy from Islamic philosophy from Jewish philosophy (Twersky 1975). Being the first Judaica scholar to progress through an entire career at a top-tier university (Mendes-Flohr 1998), in Wolfson is also represented the fulfillment of the goals of the 19th-century Wissenschaft des Judentums movement.
Famous quotes containing the word harry:
“People named John and Mary never divorce. For better or for worse, in madness and in saneness, they seem bound together for eternity by their rudimentary nomenclature. They may loathe and despise one another, quarrel, weep, and commit mayhem, but they are not free to divorce. Tom, Dick, and Harry can go to Reno on a whim, but nothing short of death can separate John and Mary.”
—John Cheever (1912–1982)