Averroes Quotes on Knowledge
Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126–1198) — the Andalusian Muslim philosopher and Maliki jurist whose long sequence of commentaries on the Aristotelian corpus made him the principal medieval interpreter of Aristotle in both the Islamic and Latin Christian traditions — gave classical Islamic philosophy its most rigorous defense of the philosophical sciences against al-Ghazali’s earlier theological critique. The Decisive Treatise (Faṣl al-maqāl) defends the religious legitimacy of philosophical inquiry on Quranic-juristic grounds, while The Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahāfut al-Tahāfut) systematically rebuts al-Ghazali’s earlier Incoherence of the Philosophers and the broader long commentaries (the Long Commentary on the De Anima above all) develop the famous doctrine of the unicity of the material intellect that Aquinas would target in the De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas. The framework shaped Latin Christian Scholasticism through the Latin Averroists at Paris and the broader medieval Aristotelian tradition.
Quotes
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Attributed to Averroes:
“Truth does not contradict truth.”
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“Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect.”
Attributed to Averroes, in: John Bartlett (1968) Familiar Quotations . p. 155 -
Attributed to Averroes:
“If reason and revelation appear to disagree, it is the surface meaning of the revealed text that must be reinterpreted.”
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Attributed to Averroes:
“The intellect is no other than the perception of things by their causes.”
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Attributed to Averroes:
“Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hatred, and hatred leads to violence.”
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Attributed to Averroes:
“Philosophy is the friend and milk-sister of religion.”
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“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. -
“Averroës, Charles Edwin Butterworth (1977) Averroës' Three Short Commentaries on Aristotle's "Topics," . p. 92”
[In the introduction to his Middle Commentary on Aristotle 's Topics, Averroes said] This art has three parts. The first part sets forth the speeches from which dialectical conversation is composed — i.e., its parts, and the parts of its parts on to its simplest components. This part is found in the first treatise on Aristotle's book. The second part sets forth the topics from which syllogisms are -
“Attributed to Averroes, in: John Bartlett (1968) Familiar Quotations . p. 155”
Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect. -
“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 -
“The double meaning has been given to suit people's diverse intelligence. The apparent contradictions are meant to stimulate the learned to deeper study.”
The Decisive Treatise | Ch 2 -
“On the whole, a man who denies the existence of the effects arranged according to the causes in the question of arts , or whose wisdom cannot understand it, then he has no knowledge of the art of its Maker.”
On the Harmony of Religions and Philosophy