Ibn Rushd (Averroes)
1126 – 1198 · Córdoba; Marrakesh
A judge and philosopher from Córdoba whose commentaries on Aristotle made him known in medieval Europe simply as 'the Commentator'.
Key ideas
Ibn Rushd wrote detailed commentaries on nearly all of Aristotle's works, aiming to recover Aristotle's own meaning from the layers of later interpretation. Translated into Latin and Hebrew, they shaped how European universities read Aristotle for centuries.
His Incoherence of the Incoherence is a point-by-point reply to Al-Ghazali. He defended natural causation, arguing that to deny that things have real causal powers is to deny that they have natures at all, and so to make knowledge impossible. He also held that philosophical reasoning and revealed religion, rightly understood, cannot truly conflict.
Life, briefly
Ibn Rushd came from a family of judges in Córdoba, in Muslim Spain, and served as a judge himself in Seville and Córdoba, and as a court physician. Late in life he fell from favour for a time and some of his books were burned. He died in Marrakesh in 1198. His Latin followers, the 'Averroists', became a major and controversial movement at the University of Paris.
Major works
- The Incoherence of the Incoherence
- The Decisive Treatise
- Long Commentaries on Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics and On the Soul
Appears in
Further reading
- EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Ibn Rushd (Averroes)
- WikipediaAverroes