Ibn Rushd (Averroes) · Philosophy
The achievement that made Averroes immortal in Europe: his lifelong project of commenting on Aristotle, at three levels of depth, to recover the philosopher’s true meaning. This lesson asks how a Muslim judge in Spain became simply ‘the Commentator’ for medieval Christendom, and what disciplined commentary achieves as a form of philosophy.
The story of Averroes the Commentator begins, according to his student, with a conversation at court. Around 1169 the philosopher Ibn Tufayl introduced the young Averroes to the Almohad caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf, a ruler with a genuine taste for philosophy. The caliph complained that Aristotle’s books were priceless but their translations obscure, their meaning tangled and hard to reach, and he wished someone would explain them clearly. Ibn Tufayl, too old for the task, pointed to Averroes. From that commission grew the labour of a lifetime: over the next quarter-century, alongside his duties as physician and judge, Averroes worked through nearly the entire Aristotelian corpus - logic, physics, astronomy, biology, psychology, metaphysics, ethics - explaining, clarifying, and defending it. He would come to be known in Arabic as al-Sharih, the Commentator, and by the same title, capitalized and definite, throughout Latin Europe.
Averroes did not write one kind of commentary but three, graded by depth and audience, and the distinction is central to his method. The short commentaries (or epitomes, jami) are compact summaries that present the settled doctrine of a work for beginners, digesting Aristotle’s results without the scaffolding. The middle commentaries (talkhis) are paraphrases that follow Aristotle’s order and reasoning while smoothing the notoriously knotty prose, aimed at readers who want to grasp the argument without wrestling every word. The long commentaries (tafsir or sharh) are the masterworks: monumental line-by-line expositions in which Averroes quotes a passage of Aristotle - a lemma - and then unfolds it phrase by phrase, weighing every difficulty and every rival interpretation. He wrote long commentaries on only the greatest works - the Posterior Analytics, Physics, On the Heavens, On the Soul, and the Metaphysics - and it is here that his most original and daring thinking appears, including the unity of the intellect.
The deepest purpose of Averroes’s commentaries was restoration. By his time, Aristotle had reached the Arabic world wrapped in layers of later interpretation - Neoplatonic works wrongly attributed to him, the emanationist system Avicenna had woven around him, and a general blurring of Aristotle’s sharp, this-worldly empiricism into something mystical and otherworldly. Averroes set himself against all of it. He wanted the real Aristotle: the patient investigator of nature, the logician, the analyst of causes, the thinker who starts from what the senses show and reasons upward. Again and again in the long commentaries he pauses to argue that a received interpretation has misread the master, that Avicenna’s additions are foreign to the text, that a difficult passage means something more rigorous and less fanciful than the tradition supposed. This is why his commentaries are not passive summaries but active recoveries - and why reading them was, for medieval Europe, the closest thing to hearing Aristotle undistorted.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Averroes was commissioned to clarify Aristotle, wrote three grades of commentary (short, middle, long), aimed to recover the authentic Aristotle from Neoplatonic corruption, and became known to medieval Europe simply as ‘the Commentator’ - his works surviving largely in Hebrew and Latin. Explain what…
Leads to Aristotle.
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