Ibn Rushd
Ibn Rushd wrote commentaries on Aristotle that Europe read for four centuries and the Islamic world largely did not. He was born in Córdoba in 1126 into a family of chief judges — his father and grandfather had both held the post — and was trained in law, medicine, mathematics and philosophy in the intellectual capital of the western Islamic world. He was introduced to the Almohad caliph by the philosopher Ibn Tufayl, was asked what philosophers thought about the eternity of the world, and answered carefully enough to be commissioned to explain Aristotle properly. He spent the rest of his life doing it, producing short, middle and long commentaries on almost the whole corpus, at a level of textual care nobody had attempted. His own argument in the Decisive Treatise is that philosophy and revelation cannot conflict because both are true, and that where they appear to, the scriptural text must be read allegorically — with the qualification that most people should not be told so, since demonstrative reasoning is for those trained in it. He answered al-Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers with the Incoherence of the Incoherence. He also served as chief judge of Córdoba and as court physician, and wrote a medical encyclopaedia. He was exiled and his books were burned in 1195 in a political turn against philosophy, restored shortly before his death in 1198. The Latin translations made him simply the Commentator, and a whole school at Paris was named after him. The divergence in his reception is the interesting fact about him. Latin Christendom built a philosophical school on a Muslim jurist's reading of a pagan Greek, and the tradition he belonged to largely moved on from that kind of Aristotelianism after him.
- Lived: 1126 CE – 1198 CE
- Nationality: Arab
- Roles: philosopher, scientist
