In an early poem Solomon ben Judah ibn Gabirol called himself a sixteen-year-old with the heart of an eighty-year-old. If metaphysics is the domain of those experienced in wisdom and years, then Ibn Gabirol's self-assessment is not far off the mark. For although Ibn Gabirol lived--by some accounts--barely forty years, he is known primarily for his metaphysical writings: his major philosophical work, Mekor Hayyim (Fountain of Life, date of composition unknown), is a metaphysical treatise which presents a rigorously worked-out Neoplatonic cosmology. But Ibn Gabirol was a metaphysical and religious poet as well. A product of the flourishing of Jewish intellectual life in Andalusia under the enlightened reign of the Umayyad caliphate, Ibn Gabirol was one of the first Jewish philosophers in Spain to benefit from the intellectual ferment of this golden age.

Of Ibn Gabirol's life little is known. He was born in Málaga, Spain...