An outline of the ethical thinking of Moshe ben Majmona

The author outlines the principal ethical ideas of the medieval Jewish phil osopher, rabbi and doctor, Mose ben Majmona (Maimonides). She presents his basic writings on morality and his concept of bodily and spiritual harmony. The starting point for Maimonides' view of ethics as practical philosophy was Aristotle's theory of the mean (mesotes), as the dynamic point between two marginal points - excess and insufficiency. Maimonides, as a religious philosopher, developed this theory from a Jewish viewpoint, modifying them into a theory of the "vertical centre". The author believes that in the rea l centre "horizontally" defined perfect behaviour acquires an impulse which takes the individual to the Infinite, where, in the religious sense of the word, they can attain true perfection.