A Teacher
Averroes (Ibn Rushd)
The active intellect and the harmony of reason and revelation
The transmission
Abū al-Walīd Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Rushd, Latinized as Averroes, was an Andalusian polymath born in Córdoba in 1126 and died in Marrakesh in 1198. Trained as a jurist and physician, he rose to serve as judge (qāḍī) in Seville and Córdoba and as court physician under the Almohad caliphs, who commissioned from him the project for which he became most celebrated: a series of detailed commentaries on Aristotle so authoritative that medieval Europe knew him simply as “the Commentator.” His major independent works include The Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahāfut al-Tahāfut), a defense of philosophy against Al-Ghazali, and the Decisive Treatise (Faṣl al-Maqāl, c.
1179). In the Decisive Treatise, Averroes argued that philosophy and revelation are two paths to one truth—demonstration for the trained philosopher and persuasion for the wider community—and that rational inquiry is itself a religious duty.
His best-known philosophical doctrine concerns the active intellect: he held that the highest human fulfilment is reached through the mind’s conjunction with a single, shared, immaterial Intellect that completes all human knowing.
Though his “unicity of the intellect” was contested, his insistence that reason can reach demonstrative certainty and that mind partakes of a universal intelligence carried his influence far beyond the Islamic world into Latin Averroism and the later European tradition of reason.
What they gave
Active intellect and conjunction: Teaches that human perfection lies in uniting the individual mind with a single universal Intellect, a vision of consciousness as participation in something greater than the self.
- Harmony of reason and revelation: Argues that inner rational insight and revealed truth converge, legitimizing the disciplined use of the mind as a path to the real.
- Demonstrative certainty: Defends the power of disciplined reasoning to reach truth, an ancestor of the conviction that mind, rightly used, grasps reality directly.
- Transmission of Aristotle: His commentaries preserved and clarified the Greek account of soul and intellect for both Islamic and European thought.
In their words
For truth does not oppose truth; rather, it agrees with and bears witness to it.
Truth does not oppose truth but accords with it and bears witness to it.
Since it has now been established that the Law has rendered obligatory the study of beings by the intellect, and reflection on them, and since reflection is nothing more than inference and drawing out of the unknown from the known, and since this is reasoning or at any rate done by reasoning, therefore we are under an obligation to carry on our study of beings by intellectual reasoning.
Now since this religion is true and summons to the study which leads to knowledge of the Truth, we the Muslim community know definitely that demonstrative study does not lead to [conclusions] conflicting with what Scripture has given us; for truth does not oppose truth but accords with it and bears witness to it.
Assent to a thing as a result of an indication [of it] arising in the soul is something compulsory, not voluntary: i.e. it is not for us [to choose] not to assent or to assent, as it is to stand up or not to stand up.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: Aristotle (whom he expounded); Al-Farabi’s intellect theory; Avicenna, with and against whom he argued.
- Taught / Influenced: Latin Averroism, the debates of Thomas Aquinas, the Jewish philosophical milieu around Maimonides, and the rationalist currents of medieval and early-modern Europe.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- The Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahafut al-Tahafut)c.1180
- Decisive Treatise (Fasl al-Maqal)c.1178