Ibn Rushd

Andalusian philosopher, judge and physician, ‘the Commentator’ on Aristotle, the last great representative of the text-based logic of al-Fārābī, read afterwards mainly in North Africa and in Hebrew and Latin.

Life

Ibn Rushd was born in Córdoba in 520/1126 into a family of judges; his grandfather and namesake, Abū al-Walīd Muḥammad, had been qāḍī of Córdoba and imam of its great mosque, hence the epithet al-Ḥafīd, ‘the grandson’. In Latin he became Averroes, and he was known in both worlds as ‘the Commentator’. According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi he learned the religious sciences from his father, memorised Mālik’s Muwaṭṭaʾ, studied hadith and legal theory, and medicine and mathematics with Abū Jaʿfar Ibn Hārūn al-Tarjālī and Abū Marwān Ibn Jurrayūl. In 565/1169, according to the reports, Ibn Ṭufayl presented him to the Almohad caliph Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf, who wished someone to explain the difficult works of Aristotle; this began the series of commentaries for which he is famous. He served as judge in Seville and Córdoba and, from 1182, as court physician. After a period of disgrace under Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb al-Manṣūr, when jurists accused him and he was confined, he was recalled to Marrakesh, where he died on 9 Ṣafar 595 (11 December 1198); his body was later taken to Córdoba.

In logic, as in the rest of philosophy, he wrote both commentaries on Aristotle, among them middle commentaries on the Prior Analytics and the Topics, and independent essays. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes him as ‘one of the last representatives of a dying Aristotelianism’ that sought the ‘Lesser Harmony’, a reconciliation of all of Aristotle’s texts with each other. Trained in the logic of al-Fārābī, which reached al-Andalus from Baghdad, he came to discard much of it, holding that al-Fārābī had been too weak to anticipate Ibn Sīnā’s criticisms. He returned to the modal syllogistic four times in his career, defending and refining al-Fārābī’s account of modal conversion against Ibn Sīnā and building on it a new interpretation of the modal syllogism, and he vindicated Aristotle’s hypothetical syllogistic against Ibn Sīnā’s division of syllogisms into connective and repetitive. The TDV notes his view that symbols would serve logic better than words and that every demonstration is a syllogism but not every syllogism a demonstration.

His logic had little effect on the later Arabic tradition. The SEP observes that the Arabic logicians who used his work tended to come from North Africa, or from Persia at moments of nostalgia for the time before the thirteenth-century logicians, and that in North Africa he was still read and taught until the end of the fourteenth century, so that Ibn Khaldūn would have learned his logic. His close engagement with Aristotle’s text, on the other hand, made his work ‘transportable’ into the Hebrew and Latin traditions.

Works

• Talkhīṣ (middle commentaries) on the books of the OrganonAmong them Talkhīṣ al-Qiyās (Prior Analytics) and Talkhīṣ al-Jadal (Topics), both cited by the TDV.комментарий
• Maqālāt (philosophical essays) مَقَالَاتٌShort essays, several on logic, among them on modal conversion and on the hypothetical syllogism (SEP, citing the edition of 1983).труд
• Tahāfut al-Tahāfut تَهَافُتُ التَّهَافُتِHis reply to al-Ghazālī’s Tahāfut al-falāsifa (TDV).труд

Reception

Ibn Khaldūn, according to the TDV, recorded that Ibn Rushd’s epitomes of the Organon were taught in his own time.

In Hebrew and Latin translation his commentaries shaped the reading of Aristotle in medieval Europe, where he was simply ‘the Commentator’.