Averroës

Averroës, in Arabic, Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd (1126-98), Spanish-Arab Islamic philosopher, jurist, and physician, born in Córdoba, Spain. His father, a judge in Córdoba, instructed him in Muslim jurisprudence. In his native city he also studied theology, philosophy, and mathematics under the Arab philosopher Ibn Tufayl and medicine under the Arab physician Avenzoar. Averroës was appointed judge in Seville in 1169 and in Córdoba in 1171; in 1182 he became chief physician to Abu Yaqub Yusuf, the Almohad caliph of Morocco and Muslim Spain. Averroës's view that reason takes precedence over religion led to his being exiled in 1195 by Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur; he was restored to favor shortly before his death.

Averroës held that metaphysical truths can be expressed in two ways: through philosophy, as represented by the views of Aristotle, and through religion, which is truth presented in a form that the ordinary person can understand. Although Averroës did not actually propound the existence of two kinds of truth, philosophical and religious, his views were interpreted in that way by Christian thinkers, who called it the theory of “double truth.” He rejected the concept of a creation of the world in the history of time; the world, he maintained, has no beginning. God is the “prime mover,” the self-moved force that stimulates all motion, who transforms the potential into the actual. The individual human soul emanates from the one universal soul. Averroës's extensive commentaries on the works of Aristotle were translated into Latin and Hebrew and greatly influenced the Scholastic school of philosophy in medieval Europe and medieval Jewish philosophy. His main independent work was Tahafut al-Tahafut (Incoherence of the Incoherence), a rebuttal of the attack on Neoplatonic and Aristotelian philosophy by the Islamic theologian al-Ghazali. Averroës also wrote books on medicine, astronomy, law, and grammar.