After a very brief introduction, Davidson begins with an informed and detailed account of the views of Aristotle and his major commentators, whose writings had enormous influence on the development of the medieval traditions. Davidson's account is supplemented with a critical exposition of the relevant teachings from the Plotiniana Arabica, from al-Kindi, and from a treatise on the soul attributed to Porphyry in the Arabic tradition. Impressive as all this is, it is simply stage setting for Davidson's detailed accounts of (...) the doctrines and arguments of al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes. (shrink)

Philosophy written in Arabic and in the Islamic world represents one of the great traditions of Western philosophy. Inspired by Greek philosophical works and the indigenous ideas of Islamic theology, Arabic philosophers from the ninth century onwards put forward ideas of great philosophical and historical importance. This collection of essays, by some of the leading scholars in Arabic philosophy, provides an introduction to the field by way of chapters devoted to individual thinkers or groups, especially during the 'classical' period from (...) the ninth to the twelfth centuries. It also includes chapters on areas of philosophical inquiry across the tradition, such as ethics and metaphysics. Finally, it includes chapters on later Islamic thought, and on the connections between Arabic philosophy and Greek, Jewish, and Latin philosophy. The volume also includes a useful bibliography and a chronology of the most important Arabic thinkers. (shrink)

Averroes asserts in his Long Commentary on the De Anima and in his Long Commentary on the Metaphysics that principles of the science of metaphysics are established in the science of psychology. In psychology, human intellectual understanding is found to require the separate agent intellect for the coming to be of knowledge. The analysis of human psychology establishes that intellect must exist and must be separate from the human being in existence. Moreover there exists potency in those things called intellect, (...) thanks to the argument for the existence of the material intellect. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Philosophy and theology God and natural philosophy Religion and political philosophy.

This valuable reference work synthesizes and elucidates traditional themes and issues in Islamic philosophy as well as prominent topics emerging from the last twenty years of scholarship. Written for a wide readership of students and scholars, The Routledge Companion to Islamic Philosophy is unique in including coverage of both perennial philosophical issues in an Islamic context and also distinct concerns that emerge from Islamic religious thought. This work constitutes a substantial affirmation that Islamic philosophy is an integral part of the (...) Western philosophical tradition. Featuring 33 chapters, divided into seven thematic sections, this volume explores the major areas of philosophy: Logic, Metaphysics, Philosophy in the Sciences, Philosophy of Mind/Epistemology, and Ethics/Politics as well as philosophical issues salient in Islamic revelation, theology, prophecy, and mysticism. Other features include: •A focus on both the classical and post-classical periods •A contributing body that includes both widely respected scholars from around the world and a handful of the very best younger scholars •"Reference" and "Further Reading" sections for each chapter and a comprehensive index for the whole volume The result is a work that captures Islamic philosophy as philosophy. In this way it serves students and scholars of philosophy and religious studies and at the same time provides valuable essays relevant to the study of Islamic thought and theology. (shrink)

Born in 1126 to a family of Maliki legal scholars, Ibn Rushd, known as Averroes, enjoyed a long career in religious jurisprudence at Seville and Cordoba while at the same time advancing his philosophical studies of the works of Aristotle. This translation of Averroes’ Long Commentary on Aristotle’s _De Anima_ brings to English-language readers the complete text of this influential work of medieval philosophy. Richard C. Taylor provides rich notes on the Long Commentary and a generous introduction that discusses Averroes’ (...) most mature reflections on Aristotle’s teachings as well as Averroes' comprehensive philosophical views on soul and intellect. It is only in the Long Commentary that Averroes finally resolves to his satisfaction the much vexed issue of the nature of intellect, Taylor shows. (shrink)

Al-Fârâbî’s thought on intellect was known to the Latin West through the translation of his Letter on the Intellect, through the Long Commentary on the De Anima by Averroes and through some other works. Al-Fârâbî identified the active power of intellect in Aristotle’s De Anima 3.5 as the unique and separately existing Agent Intellect, but the role of the Agent Intellect in forming intelligibles in act in the human soul is by no means unequivocally clear. Further, the apprehension of intelligibles (...) by human beings and the intellectual development of the soul, oftentimes described as an activity of abstracting (intaza`a), seems to be a genuineabstraction from experience, yet it somehow involves the emanative power of the Agent Intellect. This paper works to provide a coherent explanation of the natureof abstraction and the role of Agent Intellect in that activity. (shrink)

Prophecy is conspicuous by its complete absence from all three of the commentaries on De Anima by Averroes. However, prophecy and philosophical metaphysics are discussed by him in his Commentary on the Parva Naturalia, a work written before his methodological work on philosophy and religion, the Faṣl al-maqāl, generally held to have been written ca. 1179-1180. The analyses and remarks of Averroes presented in that Commentary have been characterized by Herbert Davidson as “extremely radical” to the extent that “The term (...) prophet would, on this reading, mean nothing more than the human author of Scripture; and the term revelation would mean a high level of philosophical knowledge”. In the present article I discuss Averroes on method in matters of religion and philosophy as well as prophecy in philosophically argumentative works and in dialectical works, with particular consideration of the reasoning of his Commentary on the Parva Naturalia. I conclude that Averroes found in philosophy and its sciences the most complete and precise truth content and highest levels of knowledge and understanding and from them constructed his worldview, while he found prophecy and religion to be like an Aristotelian practical science in that they concern good and right conduct in the achievement of an end attained in action, not truths to be known for their own sake. (shrink)

L'A. esamina in particolare il Commento grande al De anima. In primo luogo evidenzia l'insegnamento averroista in relazione al tema dell'intelletto e dell'individuo, in secondo luogo esamina alcune proposizioni relative all'immortalità dell'anima individuale, ma sottolinea la difficoltà di conciliare tali affermazioni di Averroè con la dottrina dell'intelletto. L'ultima parte dello studio propone un esame critico del recente studio di O.N. Mohammed, Averroes, Aristotle, and the Qur'an on Immortality «International Philosophical Quarterly» 33 37-55.

Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd (ca. 1126-98), who came to be known in the Latin West as Averroes, was born at Cordoba into a family prominent for its expert devotion to the study and development of religious law (shar'ia). In Arabic sources al-Hafid (“the Grandson”) is added to his name to distinguish him from his grandfather (d. 1126), a famous Malikite jurist who served the ruling Almoravid regime as qadi (judge) and even as imam (prayer leader (...) and chief religious authority) at the magnificent Great Mosque which still stands today in the city of Averroes' birth and where Averroes himself served as Grand Qadi (chief judge). When the governing regime changed with the success of 'Abd al-Mu'min (r. 1130-63), founder of the Almohad (al-Muwahhidun) dynasty, the members of the family continued to flourish under a new religious orientation based on the teachings of the reformer, al-Mah. di ibn Tumart (d. ca. 1129-30). Although insistent on the strict adherence to religious law, Ibn Tumart's teachings were at the same time equally insistent on the essential rationality of human understanding of the existence and unity (tawhid) of God and his creation as well as the rationality of the Qur'an and its interpretation. (shrink)

After a very brief introduction, Davidson begins with an informed and detailed account of the views of Aristotle and his major commentators, whose writings had enormous influence on the development of the medieval traditions. Davidson's account is supplemented with a critical exposition of the relevant teachings from the Plotiniana Arabica, from al-Kindi, and from a treatise on the soul attributed to Porphyry in the Arabic tradition. Impressive as all this is, it is simply stage setting for Davidson's detailed accounts of (...) the doctrines and arguments of al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes. (shrink)

A collection of five essays in which the religious experiences and activities of individuals, communities, and cultures are seen as preeminently rational responses to reality. Of interest to students and scholars of technology and philosophy.

The Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have bequeathed to the world a rich religious and cultural heritage which has been enormously influential through the centuries up to the present. While this is easily evident in the modern practices of these monotheisms, it is also profoundly present in the development of their diverse intellectual traditions with theological and philosophical insights and analyses seeking to understand and explain the nature of the presence of the divine to human beings. The present collection of essays (...) by a wide array of North American scholars provides a dozen studies of language, discourse, debate, and reasoning with a focus on theological and philosophical issues central to these three traditions that commonly call Abraham their human and/or spiritual father. Collectively these essays represent a dialogue among those who work at crossroads of theology, philosophy, history, language, and religion. Their dialogue adds to the growing library of works that seek to highlight collaboration and common ground between these religious and philosophical traditions. The dialogue is multi-directional, taking place within various religions and philosophical perspectives, as well as between religion, theology, and philosophy. It is also multi-purpose in that it seeks to transcend the mere theoretical, and to reveal the concrete; the thinkers, philosophers, and theologians discussed in these essays were deeply concerned with mutual understanding and peaceful co-existence, a goal that has become even more desirable in this post-9/11 world. (shrink)

With his clear and accessible prose, impeccable scholarship, and balanced Judgment, Roland Teske, SJ, has been an influential and important voice in Medieval philosophy for more than thirty years. This volume, in his honour, brings together more than a dozen essays on central metaphysical and theological themes in Augustine and other medieval thinkers. The authors, listed below, are noted scholars who draw upon Teskes work, reflect on it, go beyond it, and at times even disagree with it, but always in (...) a spirit of respectful co-operation, and always with the aim of getting at the truth. Essays on Augustine contributed by Gerald Bonner, Charles Brittain, Joseph Koterski, SJ, Joseph T. Lienhard, SJ, David Vincent Meconi, SJ, Ann A. Pang-White, Frederick Van Fleteren, Dorothea Weber, and James Wetzel. Essays on Bernard of Clairvaux, William of Auvergne, and other medieval themes contributed by John P. Doyle, William Harmless, SJ, John A. Laumakis, Edward P. Mahoney, and Philipp W. Rosemann. (shrink)

The classical rationalist philosophical tradition in Arabic reached its culmination in the writings of the twelfth-century Andalusian Averroes whose translated commentaries on Aristotle conveyed to the Latin West a rationalist approach which significantly challenged and affected theological and philosophical thinking in that Christian context. That methodology is shown at work in his Fasl al-Maqāl or Book of the Distinction of Discourse and the Establishment of the Relation of Religious Law and Philosophy (c. 1280), although the deeply philosophical character of his (...) subtle arguments has gone largely unappreciated. Here the philosophical foundations for his reasoning are exposed to reveal key elements of his rationalism. That approach is confirmed in his assertion in his later Long Commentary on the Metaphysics (c. 1290) that the highest worship of God is to be found first and foremost in the philosophical science of metaphysics rather than in the rituals of religion. (shrink)

Recently much interest has been shown in the notion of intelligible species in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Intelligible species supposedly explain humanknowing of the world and universals. However, in some cases, the historical context and the philosophical sources employed by Aquinas have been sorely neglected. As a result, new interpretations have been set forth which needlessly obscure an already controversial and perhaps even philosophically tenuous doctrine. Using a recent article by Houston Smit as an example of a novel and (...) anachronistic modern interpretation of Aquinas’s abstractionism, this paper shows that Aquinas follows the intentional transference of Averroes who proposes a genuine doctrine of abstraction of intelligibles from experienced sensible particulars. The paper also shows that Aquinas uses the doctrine of primary and secondary causality from the Liber de causis when he asserts that human abstractive powers function only insofar as they are a participation in Divine illumination. (shrink)

456 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY or PHILOSOPHY 34:3 JULY 1996 of reflection about rhetorical practices that I suspect Aristotle was trying to elicit in his own time and that Garver is trying to elicit in his. DAVID J. DEPEW California State University, FuUerton Fran O'Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999. Pp. xvi + 3oo. Cloth, $8o.oo. The importance of doctrines found in the Latin translations of the late fifth-century Greek works of pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite for (...) the formation of the theologi- cal and philosophical thought of Thomas Aquinas is obvious to anyone well-versed in the texts of Aquinas. However, it is by no means obvious how Aquinas read, under- stood, and transformed the Christian Neoplatonic theology of this apparent disciple of Proclus or Damascius so as to make it an integral part of his understanding of God and creation. O'Rourke rightly conceived his task as twofold: first, the texts of Dionysius must be properly understood; second, the interpretation and use of these by Aquinas can itself be assessed and appreciated in its own thirteenth-century con- text. In the first part of the book he examines the question of knowledge of God, with one chapter devoted to Dionysius and a second devoted to Aquinas's use of "Dionysian Elements" in discovering God. Part Two examines their teachings on the "Transcendence of Being and Good" in chapters 3 and 4. Part Three contains three chapters on the "Unity.. (shrink)

Al-Fârâbî’s thought on intellect was known to the Latin West through the translation of his Letter on the Intellect, through the Long Commentary on the De Anima by Averroes and through some other works. Al-Fârâbî identified the active power of intellect in Aristotle’s De Anima 3.5 as the unique and separately existing Agent Intellect, but the role of the Agent Intellect in forming intelligibles in act in the human soul is by no means unequivocally clear. Further, the apprehension of intelligibles (...) by human beings and the intellectual development of the soul, oftentimes described as an activity of abstracting , seems to be a genuineabstraction from experience, yet it somehow involves the emanative power of the Agent Intellect. This paper works to provide a coherent explanation of the natureof abstraction and the role of Agent Intellect in that activity. (shrink)

This article explicates Averroes's understanding of human knowing and abstraction in this three commentaries on Aristotle's De Anima. While Averroes's views on the nature of the human material intellect changes through the three commentaries until he reaches is famous view of the unity of the material intellect as one for all human beings, his view of the agent intellect as 'form for us' is sustained throughout these works. In his Long Commentary on the De Anima he reveals his dependence on (...) al-Fârâbî for this notion and provides a detailed critique of the Farabian notion that the agent intellect is 'form for us' only as agent cause, not as our true formal cause. Although Averroes argues that the agent intellect must somehow be intrinsic to us as our form since humans are per se rational and undertake acts of knowing by will, his view is shown to rest on an equivocal use of the notion of formal cause. The agent intellect cannot be properly our intrinsic formal principle while remaining ontologically separate. (shrink)

The Arabic philosophical tradition played an important role in the formation of theological, philosophical and scientific thought in medieval Europe subsequent to the translations from Arabic into Latin in the 12th and 13th centuries. The influence of that Arabic classical rationalist tradition in works by al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes and the Liber de causis is evident in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, though the breadth and depth of that influence is often insufficiently noted and explained by scholars of Aquinas. This course (...) focuses on the metaphysics, epistemology and psychology of Aquinas in the development of his philosophical conceptions of soul and intellect in the context of his use of sources in Aristotle and works by philosophers of the Arabic tradition, particularly Avicenna and Averroes. Readings are selected from writings from each of the four major periods of his career starting with his first major work, the Commentary on the Sentences. The course was planned to be taught at Marquette, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Universidad Panamericana as a hybrid course. That is, it was taught using online tools and resources and also in the classroom with face-to-face meetings once per week. And it was taught at Marquette, KU Leuven and the Universidad Panamericana simultaneously. On Thursdays students met online with video and audio for questions and discussion with Profs. Taylor, Robiglio and López-Farjeat and the student groups in Milwaukee, Leuven and Mexico City live. (shrink)