Averroes
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| Arab scholar Medieval Philosophy | |
|---|---|
| Ibn Rushd | |
| Name: | Ibn Rushd (also known in European literature as Averroes) |
| Birth: | 1126 (Cordoba, Al-Andalus) |
| Death: | 10 December 1198 (Marrakech, Morocco) |
| School/tradition: | Maliki, Averroism |
| Main interests: | Islamic theology, Islamic law, Mathematics, Medicine, Philosophy |
| Notable ideas: | Reconciliation of Aristotelianism with Islam |
| Influences: | Aristotle, Muhammad |
| Influenced: | Siger de Brabant, Boetius of Dacia, Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides[1] |
Ibn Rushd (Arabic: ابن رشد), known as Averroes (1126 – December 10, 1198), was an Andalusian-Arab philosopher, physician, and polymath: a master of philosophy, Islamic law, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, physics, and science. He was born in Cordoba, Spain, and died in Marrakech, Morocco. His school of philosophy is known as Averroism. He is regarded as the founding father of secular thought in Western Europe.[2]
His name is also seen as Averroès, Averroës or Averrhoës, indicating that the o and the e form separate syllables. In Arabic (the language in which he wrote), his name is Abu al-Walid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd أبو الوليد محمد بن احمد بن رشد or just Ibn Rushd. In modern Tamazight (the language of the Almohad Khalifs) it would be Muḥemmed mmis n Ḥmed mmis n Muḥemmed mmis n Ḥmed mmis n Rucd.
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[edit] Biography
Ibn Rushd came from a family of Maliki legal scholars; his grandfather Abu Al-Walid Muhammad (d. 1126) was chief judge of Cordoba under the Almoravids. His father, Abu Al-Qasim Ahmad, held the same position until the coming of the Almohad dynasty in 1146. It was Ibn Tufail ("Abubacer" to the West), the philosophic vizier of Almohad Caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf, who introduced Averroes to the court and to Avenzoar (Ibn Zuhr), the great Muslim physician; both men became friends. In 1160 Ibn Rushd (Averroes) was made Qadi of Seville and he served in many court appointments in Seville and Cordoba, and in Morocco during his career. At the end of the 12th century, following the Almohads conquest of Al-Andalus, his political career was ended. Averroes' strictly rationalist views which collided with those of Islamic orthodoxy had caused Abu Yusuf Ya'qub al-Mansur to banish him though he had previously appointed him his personal physician. Averroes was not rehabilitated until shortly before his death. He devoted the rest of his life to his philosophical writings.
[edit] Works
[edit] Commentaries on Aristotle
He wrote commentaries on most of the surviving works of Aristotle. These were not based on primary sources (it is not known whether he knew Greek), but rather on Arabic translations. On each work, he wrote the Jami, the Talkhis and the Tafsir which are, respectively, a simplified overview, an intermediate commentary with more critical material, and an advanced study of Aristotelian thought in a Muslim context. The terms are taken from the names of different types of commentary on the Qur'an.
[edit] Commentary on Plato
He did not have access to any text of Aristotle's Politics. As a substitute for this, he commented on Plato's Republic, arguing that the state there described was the same as the original constitution of the Arabs.
[edit] Independent philosophical works
His most important original philosophical work was The Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahafut al-tahafut), in which he defended Aristotelian philosophy against al-Ghazali's claims in The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahafut al-falasifa). Al-Ghazali argued that Aristotelianism, especially as presented in the writings of Avicenna, was self-contradictory and an affront to the teachings of Islam. Averroes' rebuttal was two-pronged: he contended both that al-Ghazali's arguments were mistaken and that, in any case, the system of Avicenna was a distortion of genuine Aristotelianism so that al-Ghazali was aiming at the wrong target.
Other works were the Fasl al-Maqal, which argued for the legality of philosophical investigation under Islamic law, and the Kitab al-Kashf.
[edit] Islamic law
Averroes is also a highly-regarded legal scholar of the Maliki school. Perhaps his best-known work in this field is Bidāyat al-Mujtahid wa Nihāyat al-Muqtaṣid, a textbook of Maliki doctrine in a comparative framework. He is also the author of al-Bayān wa’l-Taḥṣīl, wa’l-Sharḥ wa’l-Tawjīh wa’l-Ta`līl fi Masā’il al-Mustakhraja, a long and detailed commentary based on the Mustakhraja of Muḥammad al-`Utbī al-Qurtubī.
[edit] Astronomy
In astronomy, Averroes rejected the eccentric deferents introduced by Ptolemy. He rejected the Ptolemaic model and instead argued for a strictly concentric model of the universe. He wrote the following criticism on the Ptolemaic model of planetary motion:[3]
"To assert the existence of an eccentric sphere or an epicyclic sphere is contrary to nature. [...] The astronomy of our time offers no truth, but only agrees with the calculations and not with what exists."
[edit] Medicine
In medicine, Averroes wrote a medical encyclopedia called Kulliyat ("Generalities", i.e. general medicine), known in its Latin translation as Colliget. He also made a compilation of the works of Galen, and wrote a commentary on the Canon of Medicine (Qanun fi 't-tibb) of Avicenna (Ibn Sina) (980-1037).
[edit] Physics
In Averroes' commentary on Aristotle's Physics, he commented on the theory of motion proposed by Ibn Bajjah (Avempace) in Text 71, and also made his own contributions to physics and mechanics.
Averroes was the first to define and measure force as "the rate at which work is done in changing the kinetic condition of a material body"[4] and the first to correctly argue "that the effect and measure of force is change in the kinetic condition of a materially resistant mass."[5]
[edit] Translations
Jacob Anatoli translated several of the works of Averroes from Arabic into Hebrew in the 1200s. Many of them were later translated from Hebrew into Latin by Jacob Mantino and Abraham de Balmes. Other works were translated directly from Arabic into Latin by Michael Scot. Many of his works in logic and metaphysics have been permanently lost, while others, including some of the longer Aristotelian commentaries, have only survived in Latin or Hebrew translation, not in the original Arabic. The fullest version of his works is in Latin, and forms part of the multi-volume Juntine edition of Aristotle published in Venice 1562-1574.
[edit] System of philosophy
Averroes tried to reconcile Aristotle's system of thought with Islam. According to him, there is no conflict between religion and philosophy, rather that they are different ways of reaching the same truth. He believed in the eternity of the universe. He also held that the soul is divided into two parts, one individual and one divine; while the individual soul is not eternal, all humans at the basic level share one and the same divine soul. Averroes has two kinds of Knowledge of Truth. The first being his knowledge of truth of religion being based in faith and thus could not be tested, nor did it require training to understand. The second knowledge of truth is philosophy, which was reserved for an elite few who had the intellectual capacity to undertake its study.
[edit] Psychology
H. Chad Hillier writes the following on Averroes' contributions to psychology:[6]
| “ | "There is evidence of some evolution in Ibn Rushd's thought on the intellect, notably in his Middle Commentary on De Anima where he combines the positions of Alexander and Themistius for his doctrine on the material intellect and in his Long Commentary and the Tahafut where Ibn Rushd rejected Alexander and endorsed Themistius’ position that "material intellect is a single incorporeal eternal substance that becomes attached to the imaginative faculties of individual humans." Thus, the human soul is a separate substance ontologically identical with the active intellect; and when this active intellect is embodied in an individual human it is the material intellect. The material intellect is analogous to prime matter, in that it is pure potentiality able to receive universal forms. As such, the human mind is a composite of the material intellect and the passive intellect, which is the third element of the intellect. The passive intellect is identified with the imagination, which, as noted above, is the sense-connected finite and passive faculty that receives particular sensual forms. When the material intellect is actualized by information received, it is described as the speculative (habitual) intellect. As the speculative intellect moves towards perfection, having the active intellect as an object of thought, it becomes the acquired intellect. In that, it is aided by the active intellect, perceived in the way Aristotle had taught, to acquire intelligible thoughts. The idea of the soul's perfection occurring through having the active intellect as a greater object of thought is introduced elsewhere, and its application to religious doctrine is seen. In the Tahafut, Ibn Rushd speaks of the soul as a faculty that comes to resemble the focus of its intention, and when its attention focuses more upon eternal and universal knowledge, it become more like the eternal and universal. As such, when the soul perfects itself, it becomes like our intellect." | ” |
"Ibn Rushd succeeded in providing an explanation of the human soul and intellect that did not involve an immediate transcendent agent. This opposed the explanations found among the Neoplatonists, allowing a further argument for rejecting of Neoplatonic emanation theories. Even so, notes Davidson, Ibn Rushd’s theory of the material intellect was something foreign to Aristotle."
[edit] Significance
Averroes is most famous for his translations and commentaries of Aristotle's works, which had been mostly forgotten in the West. Before 1150 only a few translated works of Aristotle existed in Latin Europe, and they were not studied much or given much credence by monastic scholars. It was through the Latin translations of Averroes's work beginning in the 12th century that the legacy of Aristotle was became more widely known in the medieval West.
Averroes's work on Aristotle spans almost three decades, and he wrote commentaries on almost all of Aristotle's work except for Aristotle's Politics, to which he did not have access. Hebrew translations of his work also had a lasting impact on Jewish philosophy. His ideas were assimilated by Siger of Brabant and Thomas Aquinas and others (especially in the University of Paris) within the Christian scholastic tradition which valued Aristotelian logic. Famous scholastics such as Aquinas believed him to be so important they did not refer to him by name, simply calling him "The Commentator" and calling Aristotle "The Philosopher." Averroes also greatly influenced philosophy in the Islamic world. His death coincides with a change in the culture of Al-Andalus. In his work Fasl al-Maqāl (translated a. o. as The Decisive Treatise), he stresses the importance of analytical thinking as a prerequisite to interpret the Qur'an; this is in contrast to orthodox Muslim theology, where the emphasis is less on analytical thinking but on extensive knowledge of sources other than the Qur'an, i.e. the hadith.
His separation of reason and religion in The Decisive Treatise provided a justification for the doctrine of separation of religion and state, thus Averroism was a precursor to modern secularism.[7][8]
Averroes's treatise on Plato's Republic has played a major role in both the transmission and the adaptation of the Platonic tradition in the West. It has been a primary source in medieval political philosophy.
Averroes was one of those who predicted the existence of a new world beyond the Atlantic Ocean.
[edit] Cultural influences
Reflecting the respect which medieval European scholars paid to him, Averroes is named by Dante in The Divine Comedy with the great pagan philosophers whose spirits dwell in "the place that favor owes to fame" in Limbo.
Averroes appears in a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, entitled "Averroes's Search", in which he is portrayed trying to find the meanings of the words tragedy and comedy. He is briefly mentioned in the novel Ulysses by James Joyce alongside Maimonides. He appears to be waiting outside the walls of the ancient city of Cordoba in Alamgir Hashmi's poem In Cordoba. He is also the main character in Destiny, a Youssef Chahine film. The asteroid 8318 Averroes was named in his honor.