If you walk through Cordoba’s historic center, you will find the bust of Maimonides several times. He was an outstanding Jewish philosopher born in Cordoba in 1138, the capital of Moslem Spain and the main center of culture in the Middle Ages. Next to my hotel room, there was a sentence written on the hall wall:

“I can be sure today of my knowledge and, tomorrow, have the light allowing me to recognize the error.  Nothing is final in the face of the continuous advancement of history and science.” Maimonides (Cordoba 1138-Egypte 1204)

Here is snippet of his influential book “A Guide for the Perplexed:”

When Adam was yet in a state of innocence and was guided solely by reflection and reason—on account of which it is said: “Thou hast made him (man) little lower than the angels” (Ps. viii. 6)—he was not at all able to follow or to understand the principles of apparent truths; the most manifest impropriety, viz., to appear in a state of nudity, was nothing unbecoming according to his idea: he could not comprehend why it should be so. After man’s disobedience, however, when he began to give way to desires which had their source in his imagination and to the gratification of his bodily appetites, as it is said, “And the wife saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to the eyes” (Gen. iii. 6), he was punished by the loss of part of that intellectual faculty which he had previously possessed. He therefore transgressed a command with which he had been charged on the score of his reason; and having obtained a knowledge of the apparent truths, he was wholly absorbed in the study of what is proper and what improper. Then he fully understood the magnitude of the loss he had sustained, what he had forfeited, and in what situation he was thereby placed.