Averroes: Philosophy, Quotes & Legacy

Biography

Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averroes, was born in 1126 in Cordoba, the capital of Islamic Spain (al-Andalus) and one of the great cities of the medieval world. His family was a dynasty of jurists: his grandfather and father both served as chief judges (qadi) of Cordoba, and Averroes himself followed the family profession, studying Islamic law, theology, and medicine. He was trained in the Maliki school of jurisprudence, the dominant legal tradition of al-Andalus, and he combined his legal career with the study of philosophy and medicine, mastering the works of Aristotle and the Islamic philosophical tradition of al-Farabi and Avicenna.

Averroes's public career was shaped by the politics of the Almohad dynasty, which had united the Muslim West under a reformist religious program. He served the Almohad caliphs as qadi of Seville (1169) and Cordoba (1171), and later as court physician to Abu Ya'qub Yusuf and his successor Abu Yusuf Ya'qub, at whose request he composed his great commentaries on Aristotle. For most of his life he enjoyed the favor of the court, but at the end of his life he fell from grace: in 1195, under pressure from the religious establishment, the caliph banished him to Lucena, near Cordoba, and ordered his philosophical works burned. The ban was lifted shortly before his death in 1198 in Marrakesh. His body was later returned to Cordoba for burial.

The restoration was brief but historically decisive: in the decades after his death, his works were translated into Latin in Spain and Italy, and the philosophy known in the West as "Averroism" became the most powerful intellectual movement of the medieval universities. Dante, writing in the early fourteenth century, placed Averroes among the great philosophers of the Inferno's limbo, as "he who made the great commentary" on Aristotle.

Historical Context

Averroes wrote in the final great period of Islamic Spain, when the Almohad dynasty had made Cordoba and Seville centers of a brilliant intellectual culture. His philosophical project was shaped by two forces. The first was the crisis provoked by Al-Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers (c. 1095), which had argued that the philosophers' claims — the eternity of the world, the denial of God's knowledge of particulars, the denial of bodily resurrection — were heretical. Al-Ghazali's attack had been devastating in the Islamic East, and it threatened to end the philosophical tradition altogether. The second was the need, felt by the Almohad rulers, for a defense of reason against the growing authority of theological literalism.

Averroes's response to al-Ghazali was twofold. The Incoherence of the Incoherence is a point-by-point refutation of al-Ghazali's arguments, defending the philosophers' positions on the eternity of the world, divine knowledge, and the nature of causation. The Decisive Treatise is the legal and political defense: an argument, conducted on the authority of Islamic law itself, that philosophy is not merely permitted but obligatory for those capable of it. Together the two works constitute the most powerful defense of philosophical rationalism in the history of Islam — and, through their influence on the Latin tradition, in the history of the West.

Core Ideas

The Defense of Philosophy

The Decisive Treatise (Kitab Fasl al-Maqal, c. 1178) is Averroes's most famous work. Its argument is that the Qur'an itself commands the study of creation — the world — and that philosophy, as "the study of existing beings," is therefore commanded by the Law. Where the Qur'an speaks of things that accord with reason, it is to be read literally; where it speaks of things that appear to contradict reason, it is to be interpreted allegorically. The apparent conflicts between faith and reason are therefore not real: the two are routes to the same truth, and the philosopher who finds a conflict has failed to understand one of them. The treatise is also a social philosophy: not everyone is capable of demonstration, and the different levels of humanity — the demonstrative, the dialectical, and the rhetorical — are each addressed by scripture in the mode appropriate to them.

The Great Commentaries on Aristotle

Averroes's principal achievement is his commentary on the corpus of Aristotle, produced at the request of the Almohad caliph Abu Ya'qub Yusuf. He wrote three kinds of commentary: the short (epitomes), the middle (paraphrases), and the long (line-by-line expositions). The long commentaries on the Metaphysics, the De Anima, the Physics, and the Posterior Analytics became the definitive interpretations of Aristotle for the medieval Latin world, where Averroes was known simply as "the Commentator." His fidelity to Aristotle — he insisted that the text must be understood on its own terms, not bent to fit theological or Neoplatonic requirements — marked a turning point in the history of philosophy: the recovery of Aristotle's own teaching as the basis of philosophical inquiry.

The Unity of the Intellect

Averroes's most controversial doctrine is the unity of the intellect. Drawing on Aristotle's distinction in the De Anima between the passive and the agent intellect, and on a particular reading of that text, Averroes argued that the agent intellect — the active principle of thought — is one and the same for all human beings: a single, separate, eternal substance in which all human minds participate. Individual human beings possess the passive intellect, the capacity to receive intelligible forms, but the active principle of thought is not individual. The doctrine, which appears to deny individual immortality and to make thought a shared cosmic activity, scandalized both the Islamic and the Christian traditions. In the Latin West, "Averroism" became a byword for the claim that philosophy and faith can conflict, and Thomas Aquinas wrote his De unitate intellectus specifically to refute it.

Philosophy

Averroes's philosophy is a philosophical rationalism of unusual purity. His conviction, stated in the Decisive Treatise, is that truth does not contradict truth: reason and revelation agree, because both have their source in the same God, and the apparent conflicts between them are due to misinterpretation on one side or the other. His Aristotelianism is correspondingly strict: unlike Avicenna, he refused to dilute Aristotle with Neoplatonic emanationism, and he insisted that the world's eternity, in Aristotle's sense, is philosophically demonstrable.

The unity of the intellect doctrine is the hinge of his psychology. Thought, for Averroes, is not a private possession but a participation in a single universal intellect. What this preserves is the objectivity of knowledge: if each mind had its own intellect, there would be no guarantee that different minds grasp the same truths. What it sacrifices is the individual soul's claim to personal immortality in the philosophical sense. Averroes's ethics follows from the same rationalism: human perfection consists in the actualization of the intellect — the activity of understanding — and the happiest life is the philosophical life. The famous doctrine of "double truth" attributed to the Latin Averroists — that something can be true in philosophy and false in theology — is a distortion of his actual position, which was that truth is one and apparent conflicts must be resolved by interpretation.

Major Works

Averroes's major works include the three commentaries on Aristotle — most importantly the long commentaries on the Metaphysics, the De Anima, and the Physics — the Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahafut al-Tahafut, c. 1180), his refutation of al-Ghazali; the Decisive Treatise (Fasl al-Maqal, c. 1178), his legal defense of philosophy; and the medical encyclopedia Kulliyat (Colliget in Latin), which was used in European medical schools. His works on jurisprudence and theology complete a corpus of some eighty surviving titles.

Famous Quotes

The most famous of Averroes's formulations is the argument of the Decisive Treatise that the Law commands the study of philosophy, and that "the Law invites us and urges us to undertake this reflection" upon existing beings. His most quoted philosophical claim is the rationalist principle that "truth does not contradict truth, but agrees with it and bears witness to it." And his most famous self-description, from his commentary on Aristotle, expresses his fidelity to the Philosopher: "I believe that this man was a rule and exemplar which nature invented to show us the supreme perfection of humanity."

Related Thinkers

Averroes is inseparable from Aristotle, the Philosopher whose "great commentary" made him famous. His system is defined by its opposition to Al-Ghazali, whose Incoherence of the Philosophers he refuted, and by its contrast with Avicenna, whose Neoplatonic synthesis he criticized for departing from Aristotle's own teaching. In the Latin West, his doctrine of the unity of the intellect shaped the thought of Siger of Brabant and the university Averroists, and it provoked the decisive reply of Thomas Aquinas. His insistence that philosophy and faith are compatible, and that reason must be free to follow its own methods, made him a symbol of rationalism for the medieval world and for the modern defenders of free inquiry alike.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Ibn Rushd" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/ibn-rushd)
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Averroes" (iep.utm.edu/averroes)
• Averroes. The Decisive Treatise. Trans. George F. Hourani. London: Luzac, 1961.
• Fakhry, Majid. Averroes: His Life, Works and Influence. Oxford: Oneworld, 2001.