Averroes

Latin and Hebrew readers in medieval Europe knew Averroes by a title rather than a name, the Commentator, a shorthand that reflected how thoroughly his systematic commentaries on Aristotle came to define how Western scholars accessed Aristotle's thought once his works began circulating in translation from the mid thirteenth century onward. Commissioned by the Almohad caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf to make Aristotle more accessible, Averroes produced three tiers of commentary on most of the surviving Aristotelian corpus, short paraphrases, middle length expositions, and long, sentence by sentence commentaries that reproduced Aristotle's own text before analyzing it, an approach later adopted directly by scholastic commentators including Thomas Aquinas, who cites Averroes constantly even while arguing against him. Averroes's own reading of Aristotle, particularly on the nature of the intellect, generated a distinct and controversial school in Latin universities known as Latin Averroism, associated with philosophers such as Siger of Brabant, who pushed Averroes's positions toward conclusions the Catholic Church would later condemn. That controversy means Averroes's influence in medieval Europe outlived and in some ways outgrew his influence in the Islamic world, where his rationalist philosophy found a less receptive audience after his own lifetime.

Before Averroes was a philosopher read across two civilizations, he was a working judge from a family of judges, trained in the Maliki school of Islamic law that his grandfather had once headed as chief judge of Cordoba. That legal training shaped the argument of his Decisive Treatise, a short but pointed work responding to a real dispute in Almohad intellectual life over whether philosophical reasoning, associated with the study of Aristotle and other Greek thinkers, was permissible under Islamic law at all. Averroes argued it was not only permissible but obligatory for those capable of it, holding that reasoned demonstration and revealed scripture, properly interpreted, could never truly contradict each other since both ultimately point to the same truth. His longer Incoherence of the Incoherence answered the influential theologian al-Ghazali directly, defending philosophers against al-Ghazali's earlier charge that key philosophical positions, including the eternity of the world, amounted to unbelief. Averroes's standing at court did not protect him from the same tensions he wrote about, late in his life a shift in Almohad politics toward stricter religious orthodoxy led to his temporary exile to Lucena and the public burning of some philosophical texts at Marrakech and elsewhere, though he was recalled to the court at Marrakech shortly before his death in 1198, suggesting the reconciliation he argued for in theory was never fully secured in his own lifetime.