Philosophy
1126 to 1198, Córdoba, al-Andalus
The Commentator on Aristotle who defended reason and natural causation, and taught that religion and philosophy are two paths to one truth.
Start learning Ibn →Averroes’s argument that the divine Law itself commands philosophy - that demonstration, dialectic, and rhetoric are three roads for three kinds of minds, and that where Scripture and proof seem to clash, it is th…
Averroes’s book-length reply to al-Ghazali - a defence of natural causation against the claim that God, not fire, does the burning. Fire burns cotton by its own nature, Averroes insists, and to deny that causes re…
The two doctrines that made Averroes notorious - that the world is eternal, and that God does not know particulars the way we do. This lesson separates what Averroes actually argued (a subtle, careful position) from the…
Averroes’s most notorious and daring doctrine: that the material intellect - the mind by which any of us thinks universal truths - is a single, separate, eternal substance shared by the whole human race. This less…
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 S…
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