Between Sense and Intellect, Abstraction and Emanation: Gersonides on Posterior Analytics 2.19 and the Acquisition of First Principles in His Writings

This study examines Gersonides’s account of the acquisition of first principles through the lens of his philosophical and scriptural commentaries and his Wars of the Lord. While recent scholars have argued that Gersonides espouses radical empiricism, I argue that his view is more complex. Gersonides holds that first principles originate in sensory experience but are confirmed by the active intellect, whose mind contains the intelligible order of sublunar reality. This study situates Gersonides in the Aristotelian tradition of genetic empiricism, showing how his metaphysical and epistemological commitments blend abstraction and emanation in a distinctive theory of intellection.