Publisher's Synopsis
This volume explores attempts at the popularization of philosophy and natural science in medieval Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Medieval philosophers usually wrote their philosophical books for philosophers, so the desire to convey psychological, cosmological, metaphysical, or even physical teachings to the 'vulgus' may seem surprising. This disdain for the multitude and their weak intellectual capabilities is expressed most clearly in the medieval Islamic and Jewish Aristotelian traditions of philosophy, but is certainly found among the Scholastics as well. Yet philosophy was taught to non-philosophers and via a variety of literary genres.
