Ibn Rushd

Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd (Latinized as Averroes) was an Andalusi polymath—jurist, physician, and philosopher—who served as qadi of Seville and Córdoba and as court physician to the Almohad caliphs. Trained in Maliki jurisprudence and the Aristotelian tradition transmitted through al-Farabi and Ibn Bajja, he composed short, middle, and long commentaries on nearly the entire Aristotelian corpus, earning the medieval epithet 'the Commentator.' His Tahafut al-Tahafut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence) is a point-by-point rebuttal of al-Ghazali's Tahafut al-Falasifa, defending the philosophers' positions on the eternity of the world, divine knowledge of universals, and bodily resurrection, while criticizing what he regarded as the Ash'arite occasionalist erosion of natural causality. In the Fasl al-Maqal he argued that philosophical demonstration and revealed Law cannot conflict, since both proceed from God, and proposed a stratified hermeneutic distinguishing demonstrative, dialectical, and rhetorical discourse. His preferred proof for God's existence is a teleological-cosmological argument grounded in the order and motion of the cosmos, rather than Ibn Sina's contingency proof, which he criticized as importing kalam categories into falsafa. Marginalized in his final years by the Almohad authorities, his work had limited continuation in the Islamic East but was decisively received in Latin Christendom and Jewish thought, shaping Thomas Aquinas, Siger of Brabant, and later 'Averroism.' Modern debates concern his alleged 'double truth' doctrine, generally rejected by recent scholarship.