  Following on many of the above considerations about the grounding of reason in revelation, and struck more generally by what might be described as a ‘faith-seeks-understanding’ methodology, one may legitimately ask: In spite of his own defense of, call for and engagement with reason, is reason really the hallmark of Saadya's world-view? To see how one might answer “no” to this question, consider the writings of Moses Maimonides (a later Jewish medieval philosopher). For Maimonides, Saadya's speculative theological reasoning might easily be seen as reasoning-in-the-service-of-pre-established-ideas (in this case, theological commitments).  This sort of ‘reasoning’ is precisely the sort of thing that Maimonides (in the extended critique of Kalam which he offers in his Guide of the Perplexed) lambastes as a fanciful, non-philosophical mode of pseudo-reasoning. To the extent that Saadya's work falls prey to Maimonides' critique of Kalâm theology, it would not, properly speaking, be a truly reason-based system. While Saadya states that “the truth of reliable tradition” is “based on the knowledge of sense perception and the knowledge of reason” (Altmann, 37), there are serious grounds for suggesting, nonetheless, that for Saadya, it is tradition and revelation, and the presence of God in man's life that these entail, which are ultimately the first foundations for knowing and living. The centrality of reason notwithstanding, revelation may ultimately be Saadya's final ground.