Averroes (Ibn Rushd)

Ibn Rushd was born in Córdoba into a family of judges; his grandfather and father were both chief judge of the city. He studied law, medicine and philosophy, and in 1169 the philosopher Ibn Tufayl presented him to the Almohad caliph, who asked whether the heavens were eternal or created. He hesitated to answer until he found the caliph himself versed in philosophy. The caliph complained that Aristotle was obscure and asked for commentaries, and this became his life's work.

He served as chief judge of Seville and Córdoba and as court physician, while writing three kinds of commentary, short, middle and long line-by-line, on nearly all of Aristotle. In 1195 he fell from favour for political reasons, was exiled and had his books burned; pardoned two years later, he soon died in Marrakesh. Philosophy declined in the Islamic world after him, and his influence moved elsewhere.

The Incoherence of the Incoherence answers al-Ghazali's attack on the philosophers, arguing that demonstrative reason and revelation cannot truly conflict. The Decisive Treatise holds that the Qur'an itself commands those able to do so to study philosophy. His long commentaries were translated into Latin in the thirteenth century, and the 'Latin Averroists' of Paris read in them the denial of personal immortality and the eternity of the world; the Church condemned these in 1270 and 1277, and Aquinas wrote a treatise against him. Dante placed him in Limbo beside Aristotle.