Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: Maimonides on the Afterlife—Updated

Abstract

This paper examines the view of the afterlife that emerges upon a straightforward and literal reading of the works of Maimonides that pre-date his Guide to the Perplexed. This view, whether or not it truly reflects the underlying intentions of Maimonides, has a central place in Jewish philosophy to this day. The view has to face a number of well-known objections. I argue that once the background metaphysics and epistemology has been appropriately updated to reflect some of what we have come to know over the intervening centuries, an intriguing eschatology emerges. The result is a conception of the afterlife that is Maimonidean in spirit and which can face down the objections that plagued its intellectual predecessor.