Harry Austryn Wolfson - Works

Works

Wolfson was a tireless scholar. About him Twersky (1975) writes, "He was reminiscent of an old-fashioned gaon, transposed into a modern university setting, studying day and night, resisting presumptive attractions and distractions, honors and chores, with a tenacity which sometimes seemed awkward and antisocial." He spent vast amounts of time secluded in the Widener Library pursuing his research. Schwarz (1965) writes that even in his retirement, Wolfson was "still the first person to enter Widener library in the morning and the last to leave it at night."

Wolfson wrote works including a translation and commentary on Hasdai Crescas' Or Adonai, the philosophy of the church fathers, the repercussions of the Kalam on Judaism, and works on Spinoza, Philo, and Averroes. The best-known of these works are listed below, their publication in several instances—among them the work on Philo—having been considered scholarly events of the first magnitude.

• Crescas' Critique of Aristotle: Problems of Aristotle's Physics in Jewish and Arabic philosophy (1929)
• The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Processes of His Reasoning, Harvard University Press (1934/1962)
• Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Harvard University Press (1947)
• The Philosophy of the Church Fathers: Volume I Faith Trinity, Incarnation, Harvard University Press (1956)
• The Philosophy of the Kalam, Harvard University Press (1976)
• Repercussions of the Kalam in Jewish philosophy, Harvard University Press (1979)

A complete bibliography of Wolfson's work can be found in Schwarz (1965). He was known principally, as mentioned above, for crossing all artificial boundaries of scholarship, as best revealed by the titles of some of his papers:

• The meaning of "Ex Nihilo" in the Church Fathers, Arabic and Hebrew philosophy, and St. Thomas (1948)
• The internal senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew philosophical texts (1935)
• The amphibolous terms in Aristotle, Arabic philosophy, and Maimonides (1938)
• Solomon Pappenheim on time and space and his relation to Locke and Kant, pp. 426–440 in Jewish studies in memory of Israel Abrahams, Press of the Jewish Institute of Religion (1927)

Wolfson was additionally known as a "daring" scholar, one who was not afraid to put forward a bold hypothesis with limited evidential support. In his work Wolfson therefore often chooses bold conjecture over safe, but boring, analyses (Twersky 1975).