Famous Averroes Quotes Explained
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. Averroes (Ibn Rushd) wrote the most influential medieval commentaries on Aristotle and defended philosophy against its religious detractors in twelfth-century Andalusia. Below are eight of the most-quoted lines.
Attributed to Averroes:
“Truth does not contradict truth.”
What it means
From the Decisive Treatise (Faṣl al-maqāl), Averroes's defence of philosophical inquiry within Islamic law. The principle that truth cannot contradict truth grounds his "two-truths" argument: revelation and demonstration must ultimately agree, since both come from God, so apparent conflicts must be reread.
“Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect.”
Attributed to Averroes, in: John Bartlett (1968) Familiar Quotations . p. 155
What it means
From Averroes's Long Commentary on the De Anima. The definition is Aristotelian: knowledge occurs when the form of an object is received by the intellect, producing a structural correspondence between mind and world. Averroes's gloss on this idea shaped scholastic accounts of cognition through Aquinas and beyond.
Attributed to Averroes:
“If reason and revelation appear to disagree, it is the surface meaning of the revealed text that must be reinterpreted.”
What it means
The hermeneutical principle of the Decisive Treatise. Where the literal sense of scripture contradicts what philosophical demonstration has established, the literal sense must be read allegorically; revelation, in Averroes's argument, never contradicts demonstrative knowledge, but its surface formulation is often metaphorical.
Attributed to Averroes:
“The intellect is no other than the perception of things by their causes.”
What it means
From the commentaries on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. Averroes inherits Aristotle's view that intellection is causal explanation: to understand a thing is to grasp it through the causes that produce it, and any cognition short of that is opinion rather than science.
Attributed to Averroes:
“Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hatred, and hatred leads to violence.”
What it means
Attributed to Averroes in modern compilations; the line is consistent with the social-psychology argument of the Decisive Treatise, where Averroes ascribes religious persecution of philosophy to ignorance, which his prescription of education and demonstration is meant to dissolve.
Attributed to Averroes:
“Philosophy is the friend and milk-sister of religion.”
What it means
From the Decisive Treatise. The image of "milk-sister" — sharing a wet-nurse rather than a parent — places philosophy and revealed religion as siblings in their origin rather than as competitors, and the formulation became the central peace offering between the two disciplines in Andalusian thought.
“Philosophers do not claim that God does not know particulars ; they rather claim that He does not know them the way humans do. God knows particulars as their Creator whereas humans know them as a privileged creations of God might know them.”
Attributed to Averroes in Voices of Islam: Voices of change (2007) by Vincent J. Cornell, p. 35
What it means
From the Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahāfut al-Tahāfut), Averroes's reply to al-Ghazālī. The argument preserves divine omniscience while denying that God knows particulars in the discursive, time-bound way humans do; God's knowledge is causal and eternal, not propositional.
“If teleological study of the world is philosophy , and if the Law commands such a study, then the Law commands philosophy.”
The Decisive Treatise | FM 44 as cited in: Oliver Leaman (2002) An Introduction to Classical Islamic Philosophy , p. 179
What it means
From the Decisive Treatise. Averroes constructs a syllogism that derives the religious obligation to philosophise: the Qur'ān commands reflection on creation, reflection on creation is what philosophy is, therefore the Qur'ān commands philosophy. The argument was an attempt to immunise philosophy against the charge of impiety.