The Andalusian Aristotelian whose commentaries on Aristotle defined Latin Scholastic teaching for four centuries and whose defense of philosophy against al-Ghazali shaped the medieval debate over reason and revelation.
averroes
Andalusian jurist and philosopher (1126–1198) whose Aristotelian commentaries, known to the Latin West simply as "The Commentator," became standard glosses in European universities and whose Tahāfut al-Tahāfut answered al-Ghazali's attack on philosophy.
Life
Abū al-Walīd Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Rushd — Latin Averroes — was born in 1126 in Córdoba, the Andalusian capital of the Almoravid caliphate, into a family of distinguished Mālikī jurists. His grandfather and father had both served as chief judge (qāḍī al-quḍāt) of Córdoba; the young Ibn Rushd received the rigorous legal, theological, and medical education expected of his family before turning seriously to philosophy.
The decisive event of his life was his presentation, around 1169, to the Almohad caliph Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf — a ruler whose intellectual curiosity was extensive and whose physician, Ibn Ṭufayl (author of the philosophical novel Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān), introduced Ibn Rushd to court. Ibn Rushd's autobiographical account, preserved by ʿAbd al-Wāḥid al-Marrākushī, records the caliph asking whether the heavens were eternal or created. Ibn Rushd hedged, fearing entrapment; the caliph then displayed the depth of his own Aristotelian learning and commissioned Ibn Rushd to write a series of commentaries clarifying Aristotle. This commission produced the work for which he is principally known.
Ibn Rushd served as qāḍī of Seville from 1169, returned to Córdoba as chief judge, and was appointed court physician to the caliph in 1182, succeeding Ibn Ṭufayl. Under Abū Yaʿqūb's successor, Yaʿqūb al-Manṣūr, however, the political climate turned against him. Around 1195, amid pressure from the Mālikī clerical establishment and possibly tied to a propaganda campaign during the Almohad campaign against Castile, Ibn Rushd was disgraced, his philosophical works publicly burned, and he was exiled to Lucena, a Jewish town near Córdoba. Rehabilitated shortly before his death, he died in Marrakech in 1198. His remains were later returned to Córdoba.
The Commentary Project
Ibn Rushd commented on nearly the entire surviving Aristotelian corpus in three formats: the Short Commentary (jāmiʿ, an epitome), the Middle Commentary (talkhīṣ, a paraphrase), and the Long Commentary (sharḥ, a verse-by-verse exposition with extensive analysis). The Long Commentaries survive for the Posterior Analytics, Physics, De Caelo, De Anima, and Metaphysics; most of the Middle and Short Commentaries survive in Arabic, Hebrew, or Latin.
The commentary method aimed to recover Aristotle's argument as Aristotle had intended it, stripped of the Neoplatonic accretions Ibn Rushd identified in Avicenna and others. Where Avicenna had built a system integrating Aristotelian and Plotinian resources, Ibn Rushd sought a purer Aristotelianism — denying the real distinction between essence and existence, denying that existence was an accident, and rejecting the Neoplatonic emanation scheme in favor of Aristotelian celestial physics.
The Long Commentary on the De Anima, surviving only in Latin (translated around 1230 by Michael Scot), is the principal source for Ibn Rushd's controversial doctrine of the unicity of the material intellect — discussed below.
Major Philosophical Works
The Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahāfut al-Tahāfut)
Around 1180 Ibn Rushd composed his point-by-point reply to al-Ghazali's Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers, c. 1095). The work, edited by Maurice Bouyges in the 1930s and translated by Simon van den Bergh (Averroes' Tahafut al-Tahafut, 2 vols., Oxford University Press, 1954), reproduces al-Ghazali's argument in full and answers each section. On the eternity of the world, the question of God's knowledge of particulars, and bodily resurrection — al-Ghazali's three principal charges — Ibn Rushd defends the philosophical position while attempting to show that al-Ghazali had misrepresented both Avicenna and the underlying Aristotelian commitments.
The Tahāfut al-Tahāfut is widely regarded by modern scholars including Oliver Leaman, Richard Taylor, and Catarina Belo as the most rigorous defense of Aristotelian metaphysics produced in the medieval Islamic world.
The Decisive Treatise (Faṣl al-Maqāl)
Written around 1179, this short legal treatise argues that the study of philosophy is religiously obligatory for those qualified to undertake it. Ibn Rushd's argument, framed in the language of Islamic jurisprudence, is that the Qurʾān commands reflection on creation; that demonstrative reasoning is the most rigorous form of such reflection; and that there can be no genuine conflict between demonstrative philosophy and revelation, since both come from God. Where apparent conflict arises, the apparent meaning of scripture must be interpreted allegorically.
Charles Butterworth's translation (The Book of the Decisive Treatise, Brigham Young University Press, 2001) and Massimo Campanini's Italian edition have made the text accessible to recent debate. The treatise is sometimes read — by Leo Strauss, Muhsin Mahdi, and others — as a defense of esoteric philosophy in a hostile theological environment; it is read by others including Majid Fakhry as a sincere reconciliation of reason and revelation.
The Latin Averroes
Ibn Rushd's posthumous reception in the Latin West was more consequential than his Arabic reception. The Almohad campaign against philosophy and the subsequent decline of Islamic philosophical activity in Andalusia left his major commentaries with few Arabic readers, while the Toledo translators — particularly Michael Scot (active 1217–35) — rendered the long commentaries into Latin. By the 1240s, Aristotle was being taught in the Paris arts faculty from Ibn Rushd's commentaries; he became known simply as Commentator.
This reception generated Latin Averroism, associated with the Paris masters Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia in the 1260s and 1270s. The Averroists were charged — by Aquinas in his De Unitate Intellectus Contra Averroistas (1270) and by the bishop of Paris, Stephen Tempier, in the Condemnations of 1270 and 1277 — with two theses in particular: the unicity of the material intellect (one intellect for all humanity, conflicting with personal immortality) and the double truth doctrine (that philosophy and theology could yield contradictory conclusions, both true).
Whether Ibn Rushd himself held the unicity of the intellect is disputed. The Long Commentary on the De Anima clearly affirms it; whether he meant it in the form the Latin Averroists adopted is contested by Alfred Ivry, Richard Taylor, and Deborah Black. The double truth doctrine appears nowhere in Ibn Rushd's authentic works; it is a Latin construction, possibly distorting Siger of Brabant's careful distinctions about the limits of philosophical demonstration.
The Condemnations of 1277, listing 219 propositions, banned much of the radical Aristotelian program at Paris. Yet Averroist commentary on Aristotle remained the dominant teaching tradition in Italian universities — Padua, Bologna — well into the sixteenth century. The Junctine edition of the Aristotelian Opera with Averroist commentary (Venice, 1550–52) was a standard reference work into the seventeenth century.
The Jewish and Modern Receptions
Ibn Rushd's Hebrew reception was distinct from the Latin. Translations by the Tibbon family in Provence in the late thirteenth century made his commentaries accessible to Jewish thinkers; Gersonides (d. 1344) commented on Ibn Rushd's commentaries on Aristotle. The Hebrew tradition preserved several short and middle commentaries lost in Arabic.
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Arab modernist thinkers — Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī, Muḥammad ʿAbduh, and especially the Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri (d. 2010) — turned to Ibn Rushd as a model for reconciling Islamic tradition with rationalist modernity. Al-Jabri's Critique of Arab Reason (4 vols., 1984–2001) argues that Ibn Rushd's rigor and his rejection of the Avicennan synthesis represent a path not taken in Arab intellectual history.
Significance
Ibn Rushd's significance has three dimensions. As an Aristotelian, he produced the most careful and extensive Greek-philosophy commentaries in the medieval world. As a defender of philosophy, his answer to al-Ghazali defined the boundary between falsafa and kalām for centuries. As the Commentator of the Latin West, he shaped the form in which Aristotle entered European universities, fixing both the questions and the apparatus through which thirteenth-century philosophy organized itself. Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, Duns Scotus's Ordinatio, and the entire Padua tradition through Pomponazzi (d. 1525) operate against an Averroist horizon — agreeing, disagreeing, or both, but inescapably engaged.