Averroes
Averroes (1126 - 1198) was an Andalusi philosopher and physician, a master of philosophy and Islamic law, mathematics and medicine. He was born in Cordoba, Spain, and died in Marrakesh, Morocco.
His name is also seen as Averroës or Averrhoës. In Arabic (the language in which he wrote), it is Abu Al-Walid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd أبو الوليد محمد بن احمد بن محمد بن احمد بن احمد بن رشد or just Ibn Rushd. In modern Tamazight (the language of the Almohad kings) it would be Muḥemmed mmis n Ḥmed mmis n Muḥemmed mmis n Ḥmed mmis n Rucd.
Biography
Averroes came from a family of Maliki legal scholars; his grandfather Abdul-Walid Muhammad (d. 1126) was chief judge of Cordova under the Almoravids. His father, Abdul-Qasim Ahmad, held the same position until the coming of the Almohad dynasty in 1146.
The origine of Averroes is uncertain, as far as the writers of this entry have been able to discern; some Arabs claim that he was an Arab, and same Berbers claim that he was a Berber.
It was Ibn Tufail ("Abubacer" to the West), the philosophic vizier of Yusef al-Mansur, who introduced Averroes to the court and Avenzoar (Ibn Zuhr), the great Muslim physician, was his friend. in 1160 Averroes was made cadi of Seville and he served in many court appointments in Seville and Cordova, and in Morocco during his career.
He wrote commentaries on Aristotle and a medical encyclopedia. Jacob Anatoli translated his works from Arabic to Hebrew in the 1200s.
His most important philosophical work was the Tahafut at-Tahafut, "Refutation of (Ghazali's) Refutation", in which he defended Aristotelian philosophy against al-Ghazali's claims that it was self-contradictory.
With the wave of fanaticism that swept Andalusia at the end of the 12th century, his high connections could not preserve him from political trouble and he was banished to an isolated place near Cordoba and closely monitored until shortly before his death (in Morocco), while many of his works in logic and metaphysics have been permanently lost in the ensuing censorship.
Signifigance
Averroes is most famous for his translations and commentaries of Aristotle's works. Before 1150 only a few Latin translations of Aristotle existed in Europe, and they were not studied much or given much credence by monastic scholars. With the rise of scholasticism came a renewed interest in Aristotle the ancient master of basic logic, which was appealing to scholastic methods and its focus on logic. When Averroes's Latin translations were discovered, they were of high quality, clear, accurate and intellecturally sophisticated. He not only translated, but made commentaries that were so good, they could form a philosophical work of their own. Indeed famous scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas believed him to be so important they did not refer to him by name, simply calling him "the commentator" and calling Aristotle "the philosopher". See also Averroism.
While mostly faithful to Aristotle's method, he found the Aristotelian "prime mover" in Allah, the universal First Cause.
He left no school in the Islamic world, and his death marks the eclipse of liberal culture in Moorish Spain.
Sources
Averroes appears in a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, entitled "Averroes's Search", in which he is portrayed trying to find the meanings of the words tragedy and comedy.
