Averroes (Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd)

About Averroes (Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd)

Averroes lived two complementary lives held simultaneously across most of his career — Maliki qadi of Cordoba and Seville on one side, philosophical commentator on the entire Aristotelian corpus on the other — until the Almohad caliph Abu Yusuf Ya'qub al-Mansur turned against the philosophers in the early 1190s and forced the two roles apart. The juridical career and the philosophical career had grown together since adolescence in a single household, since his father and grandfather had both served as qadi al-jama'a, the chief judge of Cordoba, and the family expectation pulled him toward the Maliki bench. The philosophical work began under the protection of the Almohad court physician Ibn Tufayl, who introduced him around 1169 to the caliph Abu Ya'qub Yusuf with the request that he produce clear commentaries on Aristotle for a ruler who admired but could not follow the Greek. The two strands ran in parallel for roughly a quarter century. They came apart only at the end.

Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd was born at Cordoba on 14 April 1126 (520 AH), into the Almoravid emirate that would fall to the Almohads in 1147 when he was around twenty. His training followed the conventional Andalusi sequence: Quran, hadith, Maliki fiqh, Arabic grammar and rhetoric, then medicine and philosophy. He served as qadi at Seville from 1169, returned to Cordoba as qadi al-jama'a in 1171, and in 1182 succeeded Ibn Tufayl as chief court physician at Marrakesh under Abu Ya'qub Yusuf. The death of that caliph in 1184 brought his son Abu Yusuf Ya'qub al-Mansur to the throne, who continued Averroes's patronage for nearly a decade before the rupture of 1195, in the aftermath of the Battle of Alarcos. He was exiled briefly to Lucena, a predominantly Jewish town near Cordoba; some of his philosophical books were burned in public; the formal study of falsafa was discouraged in Almohad lands. He was rehabilitated shortly before his death at Marrakesh on 11 December 1198 (9 Safar 595 AH). His body was returned to Cordoba and buried there.

The Aristotelian commentaries are the centerpiece of his life's work and the reason the Latin West knew him as simply 'the Commentator.' He wrote at three levels of detail. The short paraphrases or epitomes (jawami') compress an Aristotelian treatise into a continuous expository essay that drops the original lemma structure. The middle commentaries (talkhis) follow the order of Aristotle's text and intersperse paraphrase with running interpretation, suitable for a student who has already grasped the basic argument. The long commentaries (sharh or tafsir) print the Aristotelian text lemma by lemma and follow each lemma with extended philosophical exposition. He produced commentaries at one or more of these levels for nearly the entire Aristotelian corpus, sometimes returning to the same treatise across decades and producing successive versions whose differences modern scholarship still uses to track the development of his views. The long commentaries on the De Anima, Physics, Metaphysics, and Posterior Analytics are his most influential works in the Latin reception.

The defense of philosophy against al-Ghazali ran on a separate but parallel track. In the late eleventh century al-Ghazali had written the Tahafut al-Falasifa (Incoherence of the Philosophers), a point-by-point assault on twenty positions that he attributed primarily to Avicenna and Al-Farabi. Averroes responded with the Tahafut al-Tahafut (Incoherence of the Incoherence), reprinting Ghazali's arguments in full and answering each in turn. He distinguished Avicenna's positions, which he considered Neoplatonic accretions onto Aristotle, from what he took to be the genuine Aristotelian view — and on most disputed points he defended the genuine Aristotelian view rather than the Avicennan one. He held that the world is eternal in the sense that there has been no first moment of motion, that God's knowledge of particulars is not particular knowledge of the kind humans have but a different mode altogether, and that bodily resurrection in scripture should be read figuratively where literal reading conflicts with demonstrative truth.

The juridical defense of philosophy is laid out in the short but consequential Fasl al-Maqal (The Decisive Treatise on the Connection between Religion and Philosophy). Written in the form of a fatwa, the work argues that revealed sharia commands the rational study of beings, that this rational study just is what the philosophers do, and that for those capable of demonstrative reasoning the practice of philosophy is religiously obligatory (wajib). He then argues for a tripartite stratification of legitimate religious discourse keyed to the natural cognitive types Aristotle's Rhetoric and Topics had identified: rhetorical persuasion for the masses, dialectical argument for the theologians (mutakallimun), and demonstrative proof for the philosophers. Each stratum receives a corresponding mode of religious teaching from the same scripture; the philosopher who reads a Quranic image figuratively is not contradicting the believer who reads it literally but is reading it in the mode appropriate to a different cognitive station. The implication, drawn explicitly, is that public philosophical exposition before the wrong audience is itself a religious offense, since it strips away the literal reading the masses need without replacing it with the demonstrative grasp they cannot reach.

The most controversial of his theoretical positions is the doctrine of the unity of the agent intellect, drawn from his successive readings of Aristotle's De Anima and especially the third book of that treatise. The actualizing intellect that converts the phenomenal contents of imagination into intelligible forms — the agent or active intellect, in Aristotle's terminology — is on his reading one for all human beings rather than individuated within each soul. Personal cognition occurs through participation: the individual imagination supplies the phenomenal content, and the single agent intellect actualizes that content into intelligibility. The reading was already controversial in his lifetime, and in the Latin reception of the thirteenth century it became the basis of what came to be called Averroist 'monopsychism,' which the Paris condemnation of 1270 specifically targeted, and which the broader 1277 condemnation included. Modern scholarship is divided over how far the Latin reading captures Averroes's own position; recent work by Richard C. Taylor on the Long Commentary on the De Anima has substantially reframed the question.

Latin reception began roughly twenty-five years after his death, when Michael Scot, working at the Sicilian court of Frederick II, translated several of the long commentaries into Latin in the 1220s and 1230s. Through the thirteenth century, Aristotle was read in the Latin universities together with Averroes; in the standard layout of a manuscript page, Aristotle's text occupied the center and Averroes's commentary surrounded it. Aristotle was 'the Philosopher,' Averroes was 'the Commentator' — the definite article in both cases. By the late thirteenth century at Paris a distinct school of Latin Averroists had formed, including Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, and in the fourteenth century John of Jandun and Marsilius of Padua extended the tradition. Aquinas devoted a separate treatise, De Unitate Intellectus contra Averroistas, to refuting their reading of the agent intellect.

The Hebrew reception was equally substantial and longer-lived than the Latin. Beginning in the thirteenth century the commentaries were translated into Hebrew, often from the Arabic and sometimes from Latin intermediaries, and they became central reading matter for medieval Jewish philosophy. Moses ibn Tibbon, Jacob Anatoli, and Kalonymos ben Kalonymos translated; Moses Narboni, Levi ben Gerson (Gersonides), and Elijah Delmedigo wrote supercommentaries on the commentaries. The Hebrew Averroist tradition continued actively into the fifteenth century, when the Latin engagement had largely subsided, and provided the route through which several of his works survived for the Renaissance Latin printings of the sixteenth century — including the great Giunta edition of Venice, 1550-1552, which printed Aristotle's text alongside Averroes's commentary in eleven tomes.

In the Arabic-speaking world his immediate philosophical legacy was thinner. The Almohad turn against falsafa, the political collapse of al-Andalus over the following two centuries, and the broader eastern Islamic preference for Avicennan philosophy over Aristotelian commentary all worked against a continuous Averroist school in Arabic. His juridical writings, especially the Bidayat al-Mujtahid wa-Nihayat al-Muqtasid (a comparative manual of Islamic jurisprudence), continued to be read in Maliki circles, but the philosophical commentaries circulated more in Hebrew and Latin than in Arabic for several centuries. A modern Arabic revival of Averroes studies, often invoking him as a figure for rationalist openness within the Islamic tradition, has been a significant strand of twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought, particularly in the work of Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and Taha Abdurrahman.

Contributions

His central scholarly contribution is the recovery of Aristotle from the Neoplatonic overlay that had accumulated in the falsafa tradition. Avicenna had read Aristotle through the lens of the Theology of Aristotle, a Neoplatonic compilation misattributed to Aristotle in late antiquity, and through the developed metaphysics of emanation he inherited from Al-Farabi. Averroes systematically distinguished the genuine Aristotelian doctrine from these layers, attempting in successive commentaries to recover what Aristotle himself had held. The result was the most rigorous Aristotelianism produced in any language between late antiquity and the early modern period.

The three-tiered commentary form was itself a contribution. By writing short paraphrases for orientation, middle commentaries for the engaged student, and long lemma-by-lemma commentaries for the scholar, he created a graduated curriculum in Aristotelian philosophy that could carry a reader from initial encounter to specialist mastery within a single corpus of writings. The form had partial precedents in the late-antique Greek commentary tradition, but the integration of all three levels by a single hand across nearly the entire Aristotelian corpus was new.

In the philosophy of mind he developed and defended a distinctive account of the intellect that became one of the most discussed positions in medieval thought. Working from Aristotle's distinction in De Anima III between the passive (or material) intellect and the agent (or active) intellect, he argued that the agent intellect is one for all human beings, that the material intellect is also one and separate from individual bodies, and that personal cognition occurs through the conjunction (ittisal) of the individual imagination with the shared intellectual structure. The view had implications that the Latin tradition found unacceptable: it appeared to deny the personal immortality of the rational soul. He himself drew the implication more carefully, arguing that what survives is the intellect's grasp of intelligibles rather than the individuated personal consciousness Christian theology required.

In metaphysics he defended the eternity of the world in the sense that the order of motion has no first moment, and he argued that creation should be understood as the eternal causal dependence of the world on God rather than as a temporal beginning. Against Avicenna he denied that existence is a property added to essence in created things, holding instead that existence and essence are distinguished only by reason, not in reality. The position influenced later scholastic debates between Thomists, who followed Avicenna, and Scotists and Averroists, who followed variants of his view.

His juridical and political philosophy is preserved most fully in the Middle Commentary on Plato's Republic, written when the Politics was unavailable in Arabic. He works through Plato's account of the philosopher-king and the just city, comparing it pointedly to the actual practice of Almohad governance and finding the latter wanting. The commentary on the Republic is one of the few sustained engagements with Platonic political philosophy in classical Arabic thought and has been read in modern scholarship — especially by Leo Strauss and his students — as an Andalusi adaptation of Plato to the conditions of revealed law.

In medicine he wrote the Kulliyat fi al-Tibb (Generalities on Medicine), a comprehensive medical compendium translated into Latin under the title Colliget. The work synthesizes Galenic medicine with Aristotelian natural philosophy and remained in use as a teaching text in European medical faculties through the sixteenth century. He also wrote a commentary on Avicenna's Urjuza fi al-Tibb, a versified medical handbook.

In jurisprudence his major surviving work is the Bidayat al-Mujtahid wa-Nihayat al-Muqtasid, a comparative manual of Islamic legal reasoning that lays out the disagreements among the major Sunni schools (Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanafi, Hanbali) and the underlying methodological reasons for those disagreements. The book is still in active scholarly circulation in Sunni jurisprudence and is unusual among classical fiqh manuals for its systematic comparative method and its philosophical attention to the structure of legal reasoning.

Across all these fields the unifying methodological commitment is the priority of demonstrative reasoning over dialectical and rhetorical argument, and the corresponding insistence that where demonstration reaches a settled conclusion the apparent sense of a religious text must be reinterpreted to harmonize with that conclusion, while where demonstration has not reached a settled conclusion the literal sense governs. This is the doctrine of double interpretation, and it is the structural backbone of his entire defense of philosophy.

Works

The Aristotelian commentaries dominate his output and are the works for which he was best known in the Latin and Hebrew traditions. He produced short paraphrases (jawami') of nearly all the Aristotelian treatises, many composed in his thirties; middle commentaries (talkhis) on most of the same treatises, composed across the 1170s; and long commentaries (sharh, sometimes called tafsir) on the Posterior Analytics, Physics, De Caelo, De Anima, and Metaphysics, composed across the 1180s and into the early 1190s. The Long Commentary on the De Anima, completed in the 1180s, is the principal source for his account of the unity of the intellect. The Long Commentary on the Metaphysics, his single most extensive work, runs to fourteen books following the Aristotelian division and develops his account of substance, the categories, and the relation of God to the world. Many of the long commentaries survive in the original Arabic only in fragments and are preserved primarily in Hebrew and Latin translation; the Long Commentary on the Posterior Analytics and the Long Commentary on the Physics are extant principally in the Latin Michael Scot translations.

Tahafut al-Tahafut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence), composed probably in the 1180s, is his point-by-point response to al-Ghazali's Tahafut al-Falasifa. The form is unusual: he reprints each of Ghazali's twenty contested positions in turn, restates the Avicennan or Farabian view that Ghazali was attacking, and then defends what he takes to be the genuine Aristotelian view, which sometimes converges with the position Ghazali was attacking and sometimes diverges from it. The most discussed sections concern the eternity of the world, God's knowledge of particulars, and bodily resurrection. The work was translated into Latin in the early sixteenth century and printed in the Giunta edition of 1550-1552, where it appeared interleaved with Ghazali's text in the Calo Calonymos translation.

Fasl al-Maqal fi-ma bayna al-Sharia wa-l-Hikma min al-Ittisal (The Decisive Treatise on the Connection between Religion and Philosophy) is a short juridical fatwa-form text in which he argues that demonstrative philosophical study of the world is religiously obligatory for those capable of it, that revealed scripture and demonstrative philosophy cannot conflict in their genuine teachings, and that the apparent sense of scripture must be interpreted figuratively where it conflicts with demonstrated truth. The treatise is paired in some manuscripts with the Damima (Appendix) on divine knowledge and with the Kashf an Manahij al-Adilla (The Exposition of the Methods of Proof regarding the Beliefs of the Religious Community), a longer work that critiques the proofs offered by the Ash'ari kalam tradition and offers what he takes to be the demonstrative alternatives.

The Bidayat al-Mujtahid wa-Nihayat al-Muqtasid (The Beginning of the Mujtahid and the End of the Moderate Jurist) is his major work of comparative Islamic jurisprudence, written for the practicing jurist who wishes to understand not only the rulings of the Maliki school but the disagreements between Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanafi, and Hanbali rulings and the methodological roots of those disagreements. The book is structured around the standard topics of fiqh — purity, prayer, alms, fasting, pilgrimage, marriage, divorce, transactions, and so forth — and within each topic moves systematically from points of agreement to the principal disputed questions, naming the schools' positions and the underlying interpretive principles.

The Kulliyat fi al-Tibb (Generalities on Medicine), composed before 1162, is his comprehensive medical compendium, translated into Latin as the Colliget and printed repeatedly in Renaissance editions. The work covers anatomy, physiology, pathology, symptomatology, hygiene, materia medica, and therapeutics within a Galenic-Aristotelian framework, and was studied as a textbook in European medical faculties into the sixteenth century. He also wrote a commentary on Avicenna's Urjuza fi al-Tibb, his Quranic and prophetic-medicine versified handbook.

Shorter works include the Talkhis Mantiq Aristu (Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Logic), the commentaries on the Isagoge of Porphyry, the commentary on Plato's Republic (substituting for the unavailable Aristotelian Politics), the Risala fi al-Aql (Treatise on the Intellect), and a series of short philosophical and theological epistles addressing specific disputed questions. A complete bibliography of his works was assembled by Manuel Alonso Alonso (Teologia de Averroes, 1947) and has been substantially extended by Gerhard Endress, Manfred Fierro, and the ongoing Averroes Edition project at the Thomas Institut in Cologne.

Controversies

The condemnations of Latin Averroist doctrine at Paris in 1270 and again, more sweepingly, in 1277, are the most consequential historical controversy attached to his name. Etienne Tempier, the Bishop of Paris, issued in 1277 a list of 219 condemned propositions, many of which named or implicated positions associated with Latin Averroism: the unity of the intellect, the eternity of the world, the determinist implications of the celestial movers, the limitation of God's knowledge to universals, the denial of personal immortality. Modern scholarship is divided about how far the propositions captured Averroes's own positions and how far they targeted Siger of Brabant, Boethius of Dacia, and other Latin masters who had developed the readings. Aquinas had written his De Unitate Intellectus contra Averroistas in 1270 specifically against the unity-of-intellect doctrine, and the 1277 condemnation was issued partly under the influence of his arguments and partly against several of his own positions as well.

The doctrine of the unity of the agent intellect remains contested in modern scholarship. The traditional reading, going back to Renan's 1852 Averroes et l'Averroisme and shared by most twentieth-century commentators, took him to hold the strong monopsychist position that the active and material intellects are both single and that personal immortality follows only in the form of the immortality of the species. Recent work, particularly by Richard C. Taylor in his translations and studies of the Long Commentary on the De Anima, has argued for a more nuanced reading that preserves a meaningful sense of personal cognitive agency while still holding the agent intellect to be in some sense common. The exact reconstruction of his view is now an active area of disagreement.

The so-called doctrine of the double truth — the claim that what is true in philosophy may be false in religion and vice versa — was attributed to him in the Latin tradition and condemned along with the unity-of-intellect doctrine. He himself never held this position. The Fasl al-Maqal explicitly denies it: demonstrative truth and the genuine teaching of revelation cannot conflict, and where they appear to conflict the apparent sense of revelation must be reinterpreted to harmonize with demonstration. The double-truth attribution appears to have been constructed from a misreading of his stratification of religious discourse into rhetorical, dialectical, and demonstrative modes — different modes of teaching the same truth, not different truths.

The Almohad rupture of the early 1190s remains imperfectly explained in the historical sources. Abu Yusuf Ya'qub al-Mansur had patronized Averroes for nearly a decade after succeeding his father in 1184. The reasons for the turn against him in roughly 1194-1195 — exile to Lucena, partial book-burning, official discouragement of philosophical study — have been variously attributed to political pressure from the more conservative jurists in the caliph's court, to the demands of the Almohad campaign against Christian Iberia which required public displays of religious orthodoxy, to specific incidents in which philosophical positions were misrepresented to the caliph, and to personal frictions between Averroes and the court that surviving sources only hint at. Sarah Stroumsa and other modern scholars have argued for a more political reading; older scholarship tended to emphasize the doctrinal grounds. The exile lasted only briefly; he was rehabilitated and brought to Marrakesh shortly before his death.

Notable Quotes

On the religious status of philosophical study, from the Fasl al-Maqal: 'If the activity of philosophy is nothing more than study of existing beings and reflection on them as indications of the Artisan, and if the Law has encouraged and urged reflection on beings, then it is clear that what this name signifies is either obligatory or recommended by the Law.' (translation Charles Butterworth, Averroes: Decisive Treatise and Epistle Dedicatory, BYU 2001)

On the relation between scripture and demonstration, also from the Fasl al-Maqal: 'Truth does not contradict truth, but accords with it and bears witness to it.' (translation George Hourani, On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy, Luzac 1961)

From the Tahafut al-Tahafut, on al-Ghazali's denial of natural causation: 'Denial of cause implies the denial of knowledge, and denial of knowledge implies that nothing in this world can be really known.' (translation Simon van den Bergh, Averroes' Tahafut al-Tahafut, Luzac 1954)

From the Long Commentary on the De Anima, on the activity of the intellect in cognition: 'For if there were not in our soul any intelligible received from the agent intellect at the first abstraction, the human being would not have been related to the agent intellect as matter to form.' (translation Richard C. Taylor, Long Commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle, Yale 2009)

On the divine knowledge, from the Tahafut al-Tahafut: 'God's knowledge is the cause of what exists, while what exists is the cause of our knowledge.' (translation van den Bergh, Tahafut al-Tahafut, Luzac 1954)

Legacy

The Latin reception is the most consequential channel through which his work shaped subsequent thought. Through Michael Scot's translations at the Sicilian court of Frederick II in the 1220s and 1230s, and through the further translations made later in the thirteenth century, the long commentaries on the De Anima, Physics, Metaphysics, De Caelo, and Posterior Analytics entered the curriculum of the European universities at almost the same moment that the Aristotelian text itself entered. For the next four centuries, an educated reader of Aristotle in Latin Europe encountered Aristotle accompanied by Averroes — Aristotle was 'the Philosopher,' Averroes was 'the Commentator,' and standard manuscript and printed editions arranged Aristotle's text in the center of the page surrounded by Averroes's commentary. The Giunta edition of Venice, printed in eleven tomes between 1550 and 1552, remained the standard reference edition into the seventeenth century.

Latin Averroism as a distinct philosophical movement formed at the University of Paris in the 1260s and 1270s around Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, who developed the unity-of-intellect doctrine and the eternity-of-the-world position into a coherent if controversial Aristotelianism. The Paris condemnation of 1277 broke the movement at Paris but not in northern Italy, where it continued through John of Jandun and Marsilius of Padua in the fourteenth century and into the Renaissance Aristotelians of Padua and Bologna. The school at Padua, with figures like Pietro d'Abano, Paul of Venice, and Alessandro Achillini, kept Averroist readings of the De Anima alive into the sixteenth century, where they were finally challenged in the new context of the Pomponazzi controversy over personal immortality.

The Hebrew reception ran in parallel and outlasted the Latin in active commentary production. From the thirteenth century onward, his commentaries were translated into Hebrew by Moses ibn Tibbon, Jacob Anatoli, Kalonymos ben Kalonymos, and others, and supercommentaries were written on those Hebrew translations by Moses Narboni, Levi ben Gerson (Gersonides), Elijah Delmedigo, and many lesser figures. The Hebrew Averroist tradition extended into the fifteenth century, when several of the works that survive only fragmentarily in Arabic and partially in Latin are preserved most completely in Hebrew. Elijah Delmedigo's translations from Hebrew into Latin, made for the circle of Pico della Mirandola in late fifteenth-century Italy, brought additional commentaries into the Renaissance Latin corpus and shaped the Italian Aristotelianism that ran from Pomponazzi to Cremonini.

In the Arabic-speaking world the immediate philosophical legacy was thinner. The Almohad turn against falsafa, the contraction of al-Andalus over the following centuries, and the broader Eastern Islamic preference for Avicennan philosophical theology over Aristotelian commentary all worked against a continuous Arabic Averroist school. His juridical writings — particularly the Bidayat al-Mujtahid — continued to circulate in Maliki contexts and have remained in active use in Sunni jurisprudence from his own century to the present. The philosophical commentaries in Arabic survived in scattered manuscripts that have been edited only gradually over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the ongoing work of the Averroes Edition projects in Madrid, Cologne, and elsewhere.

The modern revival of Averroes studies in the Arabic-speaking world has been a significant intellectual current since the late nineteenth century. Mohammed Abed al-Jabri's four-volume Critique of Arab Reason argues that an Andalusi Averroist rationalism represents the path Islamic thought failed to take but might still take, in contrast to the Avicennan-Sufi synthesis that came to dominate the Eastern tradition. The thesis has been contested but has shaped a substantial body of contemporary Arabic philosophical writing. The eighth centenary of his death in 1998 produced major academic commemorations and editions in both Arabic and European scholarship.

Significance

His historical significance rests on the role he played in the transmission of Aristotelian philosophy to medieval Europe and on the doctrines he originated within that transmission. From the 1220s through the late seventeenth century, the European philosophical tradition read Aristotle through his commentaries; for several of the Aristotelian treatises, the Latin reading was Averroes's reading, with later commentators adjusting his interpretation rather than displacing it. The shape of Latin scholastic philosophy — its terminology, its standard problems, its characteristic moves — owes more to him than to any other Arabic-language source. His Long Commentary on the Metaphysics is a more substantial influence on the Latin Metaphysics tradition than Avicenna's own Metaphysics of the Healing.

Within the falsafa tradition itself he represents the most rigorous attempt at a recovery of Aristotle as Aristotle, distinguished from the Neoplatonic and emanationist accretions that had attached to Aristotle's name in the eastern tradition. This is why the Latin scholastics, in possession of both Avicennan and Averroist materials, often took Averroes to be closer to Aristotle than Avicenna was — a judgment that modern scholarship has largely confirmed at the level of textual interpretation, while continuing to debate the philosophical merits of the recoveries. His insistence on the priority of demonstrative reasoning and on the independence of philosophical inquiry from the constraints of religious authority — within the limits set by the Fasl al-Maqal's defense of the harmony of philosophy and revelation — established a model of philosophical autonomy that has been invoked in modern Arabic thought as the road not taken.

The condemned doctrines associated with his name — the unity of the intellect, the eternity of the world, the limitation of divine knowledge to universals — became the framework within which late-medieval and early-modern European philosophy thought about the relation between mind, world, and God. Even the philosophers who rejected his positions did so by formulating their alternatives in his terms. He shaped the questions that scholastic and post-scholastic philosophy asked even where he lost the arguments.

Connections

His direct philosophical patron and the figure who introduced him to court philosophy at Marrakesh was Ibn Tufayl, the Almohad court physician and author of the philosophical romance Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Ibn Tufayl arranged the introduction to the caliph Abu Ya'qub Yusuf around 1169 that resulted in the commentary commission. The two men represent contrasting Andalusi falsafa styles — Ibn Tufayl preferring the philosophical-allegorical mode of Avicenna's eastern visionary recitals, Averroes the strict commentary mode — but their personal relation was warm and Ibn Tufayl's recommendation gave Averroes the institutional position from which the commentaries became possible.

His principal philosophical interlocutor across his entire career was Avicenna (Ibn Sina), whom he never met (Avicenna died in 1037, eighty-nine years before Averroes was born) but whose Metaphysics, De Anima, and Logic he read closely and disagreed with at almost every major point. The Tahafut al-Tahafut, the commentaries on the relevant Aristotelian treatises, and the shorter epistles on intellect, on existence and essence, and on the proof of God's existence all engage Avicenna directly. He distinguished what he took to be the genuine Aristotelian view from the Avicennan modification more sharply than any other figure in the falsafa tradition.

Al-Ghazali, whom he likewise never met (Ghazali died in 1111, fifteen years before his birth), is his other major interlocutor. The Tahafut al-Tahafut is a sustained engagement with Ghazali's Tahafut al-Falasifa, and the Kashf an Manahij al-Adilla engages Ash'ari kalam more broadly. He treated Ghazali with respect — recognizing the seriousness of the critique while contesting its target as Avicennan rather than genuinely Aristotelian — and held that on several disputed positions the Aristotelian view he defended was closer to scriptural truth than the Avicennan view Ghazali had attacked. The full biography of al-Ghazali is treated in the separate entry at /historical-figures/al-ghazali/.

In the Latin reception his most important interpreters were Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, who developed the Latin Averroist position at Paris in the 1260s and 1270s; Aquinas, whose De Unitate Intellectus contra Averroistas is the principal scholastic refutation of the unity-of-intellect doctrine and whose own Aristotelianism was formed in extended engagement with the commentaries; and John of Jandun and Marsilius of Padua, who carried the tradition into the fourteenth century. In the Hebrew tradition his most active later readers were Moses Narboni and Levi ben Gerson (Gersonides), both of whom wrote substantial supercommentaries; in the Italian Renaissance the line ran through Elijah Delmedigo to Pico della Mirandola, and from the Paduan Aristotelians of the late fifteenth century through Pietro Pomponazzi and Cesare Cremonini into the early seventeenth century.

Further Reading