1001Philosophers

Averroes vs Avicenna

Averroes and Avicenna are the two greatest medieval Aristotelian commentators in the Islamic world. Averroes, writing a century later, often departed sharply from Avicenna in his interpretation of Aristotle and in his metaphysics.

At a glance

AverroesAvicenna
Dates1126 – 1198980 – 1037
NationalityAndalusianPersian
EraMedievalMedieval
Movements Medieval Philosophy, Islamic Philosophy Medieval Philosophy, Islamic Philosophy
Profile Averroes → Avicenna →

Where they agree

Both worked within the Islamic Aristotelian tradition (falsafa), both held that philosophy and Islamic revelation can be reconciled, and both produced enormous bodies of philosophical commentary. Both shaped the Latin scholastic reception of Aristotle decisively.

Where they disagree

Avicenna's metaphysics is in significant respects Neoplatonic: the world emanates from God in a series of necessary intermediaries, essence and existence are distinct in created beings, and the soul is essentially separate from the body. Averroes rejected the Avicennian distinction between essence and existence in created things, returned more strictly to Aristotle, and developed a famously controversial doctrine of a single shared agent intellect for all human beings. The Latin scholastics tended to read Avicenna as the orthodox Aristotelian and Averroes as the dangerous one, but Averroes is closer to Aristotle's text.

Representative quotes

Averroes

  • “Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect.”

    Attributed to Averroes, in: John Bartlett (1968) Familiar Quotations . p. 155

  • “There is no city that is truly one other than this city that we [anahnti] are involved in bringing forth.”

    Averroes, Ralph Lerner (1974) Averroes On Plato's Republic . p. xxiv

  • “Averroes, Ralph Lerner (1974) Averroes On Plato's Republic . p. xxiv”

    There is no city that is truly one other than this city that we [anahnti] are involved in bringing forth.

Avicenna

  • “I prefer a short life with width to a narrow one with length.”

    As quoted in Avicenna (Ibn Sina): Muslim Physician And Philosopher of the Eleventh Century (2006), by Aisha Khan p. 85, which cites Genius of Arab Civilizations by M.A. Martin.

  • “On Medicine, ( c . 1020)”

    The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes , is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes. Therefore in medicine we ought to know the causes of sickness and health. And because health and sickness and their causes are sometimes manifest, and sometimes hidden and not to be comprehended except by the study of symptoms, we must also study the symptoms of health and diseas

  • “Those who deny the first principle should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped.”

    Metaphysics , Book I

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