Ibn Rushd

Ibn Rushd (1126–98 (AH 520–95)). Spanish Muslim theologian, philosopher, Qurʾān scholar, natural scientist, and physician, known in the West as Averroes.

He is known particularly for his commentary on Aristotle, and for other works dealing with many aspects of philosophy and theology. One concerns ‘the convergence which exists between the religious law (sharīʿa) and philosophy (ḥikma)’. Another work considers the problem of predestination. One of his most famous writings, Tahāfut al-tahāfut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence), criticizes al-Gha(z)zālī's work, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, and upholds the value of philosophy as a wisdom applied to God's creation.

Among Ibn Rushd's doctrines, Neoplatonist in origin, were the eternity and potentiality of matter (the world is eternal but caused, the natura naturata of God who is eternal and uncaused, natura naturans), and the unity of the human intellect, i.e. the doctrine that only one intellect exists in which every individual participates, to the exclusion of an isolated personal immortality. When his theories became known in N. Europe c.1230, the contradiction with Christian doctrine was not at first clear, and there emerged a party of ‘Averroists’ at the University of Paris led by Siger of Brabant (c.1240–c.1284). A treatise of Thomas Aquinas was directed against them in 1270, and they were later accused of saying that ‘things are true according to philosophy but not according to the Catholic faith, as though there were two contradictory truths’, i.e. the theory of ‘double truth’. Ibn Rushd's own understanding of ‘double truth’ was one of reconciliation. It rested on taʾwīl, understood as producing, not two contradictory interpretations or truths, but rather the same single truth under two different styles of presentation.