There are lots of subtleties in the writings of Maimonides that are not apparent on the first reading. You can see this easily in the book of Chaim Solovechik. (Chidushei HaRambam) Before him you basically had to accept it on faith that Maimonides had some deep reason for the way he would decide a law, but you almost never knew what it was. All you had was people trying to dig up some source in the Talmud and trying to show that it all fit together.
No one has done anything like this with the Guide for the Perplexed, and this is sad because it is likely that the same type of thing could be done.
Today I wanted to say one deep point in Maimonides. When he says it is a mitzvah to know that G-d exists he is not referring to faith. When talking about the first commandment in the Ten Commandments he always uses the word "to know" that God exists. With Maimonides this knowing means by the two types of knowing that Aristotle claimed could exist. (1) Things we know by induction. This is called a Posteriori Analytics (2) Things we know by deduction in the books of Aristotle are called A Priori Analytics.
Now it is a known fact that I have claimed here that Maimonides was a Pre-Kantian Kantian. So you can expect that I will try to combine these two types of knowledge into one.
That is I will take note that both inductive knowledge has the problem that Hume noted and that you can never know how many samples you should have until you can make a logic induction. Also there is no reason to say the next sample should not be different from the preceding ones. You do not know this at any rate by logic. Now Hume admitted we have synthetic knowledge based on what we see. But it is not based on logic. But what results is the modern skepticism that denies knowledge of anything.
The rationalist thought that reason alone could result in knowledge. But then you get the regress of reason the fact that all the systems of the rationalists contradicted each other.
What you have with Kant a class of knowledge that you know by reason by it does not have to be so. You have to observe it in some way. That is-- he is combining these two categories into one category and by that he is expecting the building to stand --like an arch that each side without the other would fall. This is what I think Maimonides is doing. [There are lots of indications in the Guide about this but also you can see that Aristotle himself did not accept either type of knowledge by itself. he did not go with the empiricists that only accepted induction nor like the rationalist that accepted only deduction.]
I should mention that there are in fact two good arguments for God. The First Cause idea which is purely inductive. This does not work in any deductive way. The other argument from Anselm of Canterbury which Godel sharpened up. This is purely deductive. Together they fit. This is what Maimonides was thinking-- that to know something you need to know it from these two sides
