Averroes 1126 – 1198

Averroes, known in Arabic as Ibn Rushd, was a 12th-century Andalusian Arab philosopher, jurist, and physician of the Islamic Golden Age, the most influential medieval commentator on Aristotle. Born in Cordoba and serving as judge in Seville and Cordoba and as physician to the Almohad caliphs, he produced extensive commentaries on Aristotle's works that became the principal medium through which Aristotle was transmitted to the Latin West. His Decisive Treatise argued for the harmony of philosophy and revealed religion. His major philosophical work, the Incoherence of the Incoherence, replied to al-Ghazali's earlier critique of Islamic philosophy. The school of Latin Averroism shaped 13th-century European philosophy and was a major influence on Aquinas and the medieval scholastics.

Averroes — Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd — was born in 1126 in Cordoba into a distinguished Andalusian family of Maliki jurists. He received a thorough training in Islamic law, medicine, mathematics, and philosophy, and through the patronage of Ibn Tufayl entered the service of the Almohad caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf, who commissioned him to write commentaries on Aristotle and appointed him qadi of Seville and later of Cordoba.

Averroes produced short, middle, and long commentaries on nearly the entire Aristotelian corpus, the medical compendium Kitab al-Kulliyyat (known in Latin as the Colliget), the Decisive Treatise on the harmony of religion and philosophy, and the Incoherence of the Incoherence, his rebuttal of al-Ghazali. Late in life he fell out of favor with the caliph al-Mansur, was banished briefly to Lucena, and saw some of his books burned, before being recalled shortly before his death in Marrakesh in 1198.

His insistence that demonstrative philosophy and revealed religion cannot truly contradict each other, his doctrine of a single shared intellect for the human species, and the precision of his Aristotelian readings made him one of the most consequential thinkers of the medieval world. Translated into Latin and Hebrew, his commentaries shaped Christian scholasticism, Jewish philosophy, and the long tradition of Latin Averroism.