Averroes (Ibn Rushd)

Ibn Rushd was born in 1126 in Córdoba, the great city of Islamic Spain, into a family of distinguished jurists — his grandfather had been chief judge. He was trained in law, medicine and philosophy, and served as chief judge (qāḍī) of Seville and Córdoba and as physician to the Almohad caliph in Marrakesh. In a famous story, the philosopher Ibn Ṭufayl introduced him to the caliph Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf, who asked him whether the philosophers considered the heavens eternal or created; Ibn Rushd, terrified, denied knowing anything about philosophy — until the caliph showed his own learning and commissioned him to explain Aristotle, whose texts the caliph found obscure.

The Commentator

The result was the greatest commentary project of the Middle Ages: short, middle and long commentaries on nearly every work of Aristotle. Ibn Rushd aimed to recover the true Aristotle from Neoplatonic accretions (including Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā)‘s). In Latin translation, these commentaries became the standard guide to Aristotle in European universities; Aquinas and the scholastics called Aristotle simply “the Philosopher” and Ibn Rushd “the Commentator”.

The Decisive Treatise

In Faṣl al-Maqāl (“The Decisive Treatise on the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy”), he argued as a judge that the Quran commands the study of philosophy: it repeatedly urges reflection on the heavens and the earth, and reflection by the best method — demonstration — is philosophy. Truth does not contradict truth: where demonstrative reasoning conflicts with the literal sense of scripture, scripture must be interpreted allegorically. He distinguished three kinds of people — the demonstrative (philosophers), the dialectical (theologians), and the rhetorical (the majority) — and held that allegorical interpretations should not be spread among the masses.

The Incoherence of the Incoherence

In Tahāfut al-Tahāfut he replied, point by point, to Al-Ghazālī. On causation: to deny necessary causes is to deny that things have natures, and so to deny that anything can be known — “he who denies causes denies reason.”

Averroism

In thirteenth-century Paris, “Latin Averroists” such as Siger of Brabant taught doctrines attributed to him: the eternity of the world, and the unity of the intellect — a single intellect shared by all humankind, implying no personal immortality. The Church condemned these propositions in 1270 and 1277; Thomas Aquinas wrote against them. The legend of a “double truth” doctrine (that something can be true in philosophy and false in theology) was attributed to the Averroists, unfairly to Ibn Rushd himself.

In the Islamic world his influence was limited; in the West, immense. Ernest Renan’s Averroès et l’averroïsme (1852) made him a symbol of free rational inquiry.