Averroes

Averroes (Ibn Rushd) is well-known for his controversial thesis that there is only one separate intellect for all humankind. This article provides a detailed analysis of Averroes’s Unity Argument from his Long Commentary on De Anima, which argues from unified intelligible concepts to a single transcendent intellect. I set out the Unity Argument in its textual and philosophical context, explain exactly how the argument works on a new interpretation of its infinite regress (based on Averroes’s other assumptions about the mind-dependence of universals), and offer some brief suggestions as to how it might be further evaluated in light of alternative ancient and medieval theories. Ultimately, I demonstrate that the Unity Argument is Averroes’s most important philosophical argument for his distinctive view of intellect.

Ernst Bloch bu kitabinda, Aristoteles’in dusuncesinin sol kanadi olarak gordugu Ibn Sina ve Ibn Rusd’un dusuncelerini inceliyo r.  Esere genel olarak baktigimizda, Bloch’un, Aristoteles’in ortaya koydugu maddeci yaklasimi destekleyen filozoflarin bu yondeki goruslerine yer verdigini goruyoruz. Bazen zorlayarak bazen de buna dair ortaya konmus ifadelerden yola cikarak bu goruse Ibn Sina’dan itibaren yapilan katkilar ele aliniyor.

Since the Renaissance, perspective drawing has been established as the most ‘objective’ way to represent a ‘subjective’ point of view; it is precisely through the reflective surface of a mirror, as the space in which the self can be objectified, that such invention takes place. The apparent contradiction of an ‘objective subjectivity’—which most of modern science builds upon—can be properly investigated only if such space of ‘speculation’ is addressed as an excluded, invisible element of a triadic setting. The paper will then try to look at modern ‘rationality’ as a ‘projection’ arising from such exclusion and externalisation—to inspect the space of the mirror as an architectonics of information. It will do so by looking at a range of examples—from architecture to philosophy, art and literature—in which this third is consciously questioned, or where it is instead ‘invisibly’ at work. The outline of such a “transcendental topology” will then perhaps provide the tools to address in a ...

Les presentes remarques se proposent d’observer la facon dont les noms propres ont ete traites par Averroes dans son Commentaire moyen a l’Ethique a Nicomaque (= CmEN), redige a partir de la traduction arabe du traite aristotelicien (ENar), dont une seule copie unique existe aujourd’hui, conservee dans la bibliotheque Quaraouiyine de Fes. Perdu dans sa version originale arabe, ce Commentaire n’existe - a l’exception d’une trentaine de petits fragments - que dans sa traduction latine, realisee en 1240 par Hermann l’Allemand, et dans sa traduction hebraique, achevee par Samuel de Marseille en 1340. Analyser l’attitude d’Averroes devant les noms propres de ENar, qui pour la plupart ont ete translitteres par le traducteur arabe, entraine par voie de consequence un examen de la facon dont Hermann et Samuel ont a leur tour reagi face a des noms propres (quand ils ont ete conserves par Averroes dans son Commentaire), dont ils ne connaissaient pas necessairement les referents puisqu’ils appartiennent a une aire culturelle differente de la leur.

Jorge Luis Borges, we are told, devoted the last few weeks of his life to learning Arabic, with the help of an Egyptian teacher living in Switzerland. (1) In this most appropriately enigmatic of Borgesian endings, it is tempting to read two contradictory aspects of Borges. On the one hand, this sense of an ending is in character with Borges the unrelenting cosmopolitan, who would die far from his native Buenos Aires, and who, having mastered English and Spanish since birth, French, German and Latin in his teenage years in Geneva, Italian along the way, (2) and old Norse in his sixties, was attempting, in the face of death, to acquire the rudiments of an ultimate, and ultimately foreign, language. On the other hand, this exemplary anecdote leaves us with the much more melancholy image of an old man defeated. How much of the Arabic language could an eighty-seven year old blind man, dying of liver cancer, hope to learn in a few lessons? This study attempts to explore this sort of duality in some of Borges's writings, with particular emphasis on the story translated as "Averroes' Search" (first published in Sur in 1947, then included in El Aleph in 1949), and on the essay written shortly thereafter, "The Argentine Writer and Tradition." The essay proudly claims cosmopolitanism as the quintessential dimension of the writer's experience. Borges refuses to be limited to narrowly local or national themes and characters, but instead borrows from all periods of history and all cultures. "Our patrimony is the universe," (3) he boldly asserts: the essay claims for the Argentine writer the right and indeed the privilege to derive inspiration and find subjects in any culture he chooses, a declaration that flew in the face of the nationalistic politics of literature at that time in Peron's Argentina. Originally given as a lecture in 1951, the essay is Borges's response to criticism that demonized him as a foreigner, a "European," indifferent to and ignorant of the local reality--attacks coming from both sides of the political spectrum which would dog him all his life. (4) Borges argues that the Argentine writer's marginal status with respect to the Western tradition is what paradoxically enables him to play freely with all world literature: "I believe that we Argentines, we South Americans in general [...] can handle all European themes, handle them without superstition, with an irreverence which can have, and already does have, fortunate consequences" (Labyrinths, p. 184). (5) Borges compares the situation of Argentines (of Latin Americans in general) to that of Jews with respect to Western culture, or Irish writers with respect to English literature--feeling marginal, he claims, enables them to be innovative. Decades before Deleuze and Guattari's influential theory of litterature mineure (minor literature, defined by the French philosophers as "celle qu'une minorite fait dans une langue majeure"), (6) Borges develops the same idea--that the artist's marginality is a prerequisite for his universality. To the extent that it is remote and postcolonial, the literature of Argentina achieves the "deterritorialization" that Deleuze and Guattari see as characteristic of minor literature. Although Deleuze and Guattari do not quote Borges in their essay, their idea of minor literature is practically identical to Borges's marginal universality: "Kafka dit precisement qu'une litterature mineure est beaucoup plus apte a travailler la matiere," (7) they write. As to Beckett and Joyce, "tous deux, Irlandais, sont dans les conditions geniales d'une litterature mineure. C'est la gloire d'une telle litterature d'etre mineure, c'est-a-dire revolutionnaire pour toute litterature." (8) Thus Borges defiantly turns a handicap into an asset, while also claiming for himself a kinship with the writers he admires, Joyce, Kafka and other "marginals" whose irreverence became a source of innovation. (9) Other famous essays by Borges also promote cosmopolitanism. …

Abū-l-Walīd Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad Ibn Rushd (Cordoba, 1126-Marrakesh, 1198), Averroes in the Latin West, is a key figure in the history of mediaeval and early-modern philosophical thought. While the measure of his influence in the Arabic world is a source of debate for modern scholars (Von Kügelgen 1994; Najjar 2004), who show, with the exception of some cases such as Averroes’ “disciple” Ibn Ṭumūs (Asìn Palacios, 1908; Aouad 2004), that in the Muslim medieval milieu Averroes seems not to have had any legacy, Averroes had an extraordinary impact in Jewish philosophical circles as early as the 12th century, during his own lifetime, continuing throughout the 13th-15th centuries in Spain, Southern France and Italy up to the 16th century. Although the term “averroism” currently refers to the reception of Averroes’ philosophical treatises both in Latin and in Jewish culture, its meaning denotes two different phenomena which took place in parallel from a chronological point of view, but were profoundly different in their contents. In the Latin West, the term “averroist” was employed starting from the 13th century by Christian scholars to designate those philosophers and theologians accused of being followers of Averroes and in particular of adhering to the so-called theory of the “double truth” (Bianchi 2008, König-Pralong 2014)....

Resumen: Frente a una reciente lectura de Borges como un autor anarquista, el texto busca mostrar que la posición de Borges es más bien liberal, puesto que no aspira a superar la representación, sino a limitarla ante la amenaza de que todo el mundo devenga representación. Borges vincula esta última posibilidad al peronismo, frente a la cual afirma un teatro que, tras la momentánea suspensión teatral de la realidad, pueda distinguir éticamente entre teatro y realidad. Para mostrar esto, nos detenemos en los textos de Borges sobre Shakespeare y Del Campo, y en los cuentos "Utopía de un hombre que está cansado" y "La busca de Averroes", buscando mostrar su contraposición entre una vida genérica, incapaz de pensar la representación teatral, y la vida nominalista moderna que permite tanto el teatro moderno como el liberalismo político que Borges defiende.

Abstract: Given the recent interpretation of Borges as an anarchist author, the text tries to show that Borge's position is rather liberal, since he does not hope to go beyond representation , but limiting it in light of the threat of the whole world becoming representation. Borges links this last possibility to Peronism, in which he affirms a theater that, after the momentary theatrical suspension of reality, could be distinguished ethically between theater and reality. In order to show it, we will stop on the texts of Borges about Shakespeare and Del Campo, and on the tales “A Weary Man’s Utopia” and “Averroes’ Search”, showing his counterpoint between a generic life, incapable of thinking about the theatrical representation, and the nominalistic modern life that allows both modern theater and the political liberalism that Borges defends.

The Büchlein der Gesuntheit is a late fifteenth-century compendium of preventive and curative medicine. Examining the four extant manuscripts of the work provides an insight into how the compiler selected, adapted and organized his source materials, and demonstrates that the Büchlein was a structured and focussed treatise. The paper shows that both an earlier medical compendium, the Melleus liquor physicae artis Magistri Alexandri Yspani, and Konrad von Eichstätt's Regimen Sanitatis, were its main sources. The Melleus liquor offers therapeutic advice, the Regimen offers guidance on healthy living, the Büchlein both. When the two source works discuss the same plants as nutrition, medicine, seasoning (or something in between), the compiler of the Büchlein chooses the one or the other as appropriate. The paper also highlights how, in medieval medical compilations, extracts from longer works were separated from the original and took on a life of their own, while a series of shorter tracts became mutually attached and frequently compiled. The Büchlein der Gesundheit is a fifteenth-century compendium of preventive and therapeutic medicine,  created by organizing selected parts of medical treatises-themselves sometimes drawn from larger works-into a new and coherent whole. This practice was quite common in the medical texts of the time, and the compilers might not limit themselves to copying and/or translating their sources, but rather adapt them whenever they saw that the material was fit for their purpose. This paper aims to provide an insight into the way in which the Büchlein was assembled by studying the four extant manuscripts.

Le mot le plus célèbre de la philosophie est un verbe latin : cogito. C’est celui de Descartes, où l’on retient que se joue l’être même de l’ego. C’est le cogito de la psychanalyse, celui dont elle dénonce l’orgueil, l’incomplétude, et qui, en somme, l’a fait naître. Mais c’est un mot malheureux, que la modernité a perdu. Chez Averroès, jadis, la cogitation avait en arabe ses facultés propres et trouvait dans le fantasme l’espace de sa puissance. Quel espace ? Quelle puissance éminente ? On a fait le livre sur cela.

It is uncontroversial that Averroes’s position on the relationship between philosophy and religion has influenced Spinoza’s political philosophy (Fraenkel 2013; Licata 2013) and arguably it also had some influence on his doctrine of the eternal part of the mind understood ad conjunction with the active intellect (Nadler 2001; Adler 2014; Klein 2014). However, there is a strong sense in which Spinoza was firmly on the anti-Averroistic camp concerning the Averrosim debate of the Latin West understood as a debate on the number of epistemic subjects (Renz forthcoming). Of course, placing Spinoza in any Averroistic legacy is rather tricky for two reasons. First, the sources of Spinoza are very wide in their scope and not very well known in their depth (Melamed 2013). Second, there were two distinctly different histories of reception in the Latin and Hebrew philosophies which understood different doctrines of the intellect to be Averroist (Davidson 1992).
In my paper I argue for two claims. First, that Spinoza’s theory of intellect can be interpreted as one of the broadly Alexandrian variety. This interpretation fits in the Hebrew understanding of Averroism and more or less accords with the position of Maimonides and Gersonides. On this view, the intellect in Spinoza is the form of imagination. Second, that Spinoza’s theory of intellect is liable to a criticism that the late Averroes presented against his earlier position. According to this objection if the material intellect is the disposition of the imagination, it is not able to intellect all possible forms since itself has its own nature. Similarly, in Spinoza it is not clear how the human mind is able to understand something of contrary to its nature, since understanding implies becoming similar, however, on the conatus doctrine nothing can contain contrary elements.

Several scholars have pointed out the impact of Jewish Philosophy on Spinoza (1632 – 1677), and the role of Jewish intellectual history from the late middle ages to the Renaissance in shaping his philosophy, but the influence of Jewish Averroism on Spinoza is still debatable and was continuously contested. In this article I will concentrate on the presence of some of the Jewish opponents and proponents of Averroism in the works of Spinoza, namely: Jehuda Al-Fakhar (early thirteenth century, d.1235), Levi ben Gershom (1288-1344), Hasdai Crescas (1340 – 1411), and Joseph ibn Shem Tob (1400 – 1460). These are the Jewish thinkers that were mentioned by Spinoza in polemical contexts, refusing the positions of Al-Fakhar and Joseph ibn Shem Tob concerning the subordination of Reason to Scripture and the subordination of rational morality to scriptural precepts respectively, defending the opposite position that was identical to Averroes'; and on the other hand accepting some of the ideas of Ben Gershom and Crescas that were identical with Averroes like the concept of circular infinity in Crescas that was a restatement of Averroes', and the eternity of matter in Ben Gershom that was his compromising Averroes' eternity of the world with creationism. The aim of my investigation is to prove that Spinoza was well informed of Averroes' system from those philosophers, and he even put himself in the middle of the Jewish anti-Averroean debates, taking sides with the opposite positions of the Jewish opponents of Averroism. Spinoza, openly or tacitly, refused all the counter arguments of Al-Fakhar, Crescas and ibn Shem Tob against Averroes, and thereby adopting the Averroean positions that they attacked, without mentioning Averroes himself. This silence of Spinoza to the name of Averroes among all his writings while refusing the arguments of Averroes' Jewish opponents makes Spinoza's final position tacitly Averroean, so we can say that there is an Averroean subtext in the works of Spinoza that we can reveal by analyzing his dealings with Jewish anti-Averroism.

I reconstruct and analyze al-Ghazali’s arguments defending a plurality of real divine attributes in The Incoherence of the Philosophers. I show that one of these arguments can be made to engage with and defend Jeffrey E. Brower and Michael C. Rea’s “Numerical Sameness Without Identity” model of the Trinity. To that end, I provide some background on the metaphysical commitments at play in al-Ghazali’s arguments.

Les questions 75 et 76 de la Somme de théologie (première partie) rassemblent l’essentiel de la conception de Thomas d’Aquin (m. 1274) sur l’essence de l’âme humaine et son rapport au corps. Ce texte majeur de l’histoire de la pensée, aux croisements de la philosophie et de la théologie, est l’aboutissement d’une longue élaboration de sa doctrine, où Aristote et la Bible sont censés se rejoindre. D’un côté, Thomas d’Aquin entend établir l’unité ontologique du composé corruptible qu’est la personne humaine. De l’autre, il doit sauver l’immortalité de l’âme. Quelle est la solution ? La notion-clé de l’anthropologie thomasienne : celle de l’âme comme forme à la fois substantielle et subsistante. Etait-ce cohérent d’un point de vue théorique ? Etait-ce conceptuellement tenable ? Voilà l’enjeu.

Unconscious Thought in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis explores concepts throughout the history of philosophy that suggest the possibility of unconscious thought and lay the foundation for ideas of unconscious thought in modern philosophy and psychoanalysis. The book considers the workings of unconscious thought, and the role that unconscious thought plays in thinking, language, perception, and human identity. The focus is on the metaphysical and philosophical concepts of unconscious thought, as opposed to the empirical or scientific phenomenon of 'the unconscious', and it is argued that these metaphysical concepts still played an important role in the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. With chapters drawing on a wide range of philosophers from Plotinus to Freud and Lacan, Unconscious Thought in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis casts an original and thought-provoking perspective on the relation between unconscious thought and conscious thought, different kinds of thinking, and the relation between thinking and perceiving.

The paper aims to recognize that Maimonides represents, in medieval philosophy, a conciliatory approach, which adopted also by some other famous scholars like Averroes. Over the first section of the paper, the question of creation, as the best intellectual distinction between Maimonides, on one side, and theologians and philosophers, on the other side, will be discussed. Al-Ghazzali will taken, in comparison to Maimonides, to show, how, in spite of the initial impression, they are far from each other in the question, which will be clear just after contextualization of both scholars within their state of minds and historical situations.
Maimonides’ response to the question of eternity, in comparison to al-Ghazzali, puts him in a different position from both of classical theologians and Ancient philosophers, which could be better understood with recognition of his endeavours to establish a conciliatory philosophical trend during the Middle Ages.
In the second section, it will be examined the historicity of Maimonides’ approach, or to investigate whether there was someone had such conciliatory approach in common with Maimonides or not. It will be shown that Averroes has the highest affinity with Maimonides in this regard.

The pivotal role of medieval European poetry on the aesthetics of Ezra Pound is well known: he received graduate training in Provençal and was committed to lifelong study of the Troubadours, whose innovations in poetic form he saw as precursors to Dante’s great elder contemporary, Guido Cavalcanti. Pound placed sufficient stock in Guido’s shaping role in the European poetic tradition that he undertook to publish a deluxe edition of the Rime, complete with photographic plates of manuscripts on vellum, putting more than one press out of business in the process. It was not only poetry that drove this fixation for Pound, but a conviction that medieval poets kept alight a flame of Gnostic wisdom counter to the predominating currents of Thomistic inflections of Aristotle. He saw in Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel the preservation of light philosophy reaching back beyond Grosseteste and Eriugena to the Presocratics and the early Neoplatonists. A tenuous but pivotal part of this hidden heritage resided in the Arabic transmission of classical texts, as well as major commentaries, especially those of Avicenna and Averroes on Aristotle’s De Anima. Scholars such as Peter Liebregts and Peter Makin have done admirable work in identifying and annotating the various citations and suggestive hints of this tradition throughout Pound’s poetry and prose. This paper seeks to establish wider aesthetic and strategic contexts for Pound’s use of medieval Arabic light philosophy: what purpose did this heritage serve for the poet who urged his peers to Make It New? How does it inflect his poetics, and how does it intersect with his personal and professional circumstances at particular points in his career? This attempt to give a broader picture to Pound’s very particular medievalism aims to give perspective on Modernist poetics, shaped in significant part by his influence.

In this paper I compare Avicenna’s and Averroes’ notions of “intention” (ma‘na, intentio) and show how Averroes’ understanding aims to revise Avicenna’s and make it conform to a more orthodox Aristotelian framework, thus preparing the way for the adoption of this notion in Western Medieval thought.

Though Averroes is not generally considered to be sympathetic to Neoplatonic thinking, there are definite parallels between the philosophies of intellect of Averroes and Plotinus. Both can be considered to be "Idealists" in that intelligible form precedes sensible form in perception, and that the material intellect of Averroes or Reason Principle of Plotinus, nous hylikos or pathetikos, depends in its functioning on the agent intellect of Averroes or Intellectual Principle of Plotinus, nous poietikos. The formation of the image in the oculus mentis is coincident with the formation of a thought, and the sensible form is a transient residue of the permanent intelligible form, as if it is reflected in a mirror and projected on a surface. For both philosophers, material intellect and intellect not connected to sense perception are mediated by a kind of intellectus in habitu, a practicing intellect which leads the individual to higher forms of understanding. The development of phantasmata or imprints of foms in the oculus mentis in the imagination or phantasia is the product of a dialectical relation between the mechanisms of sense perception in material intellect and an a priori understanding of forms in the intelligible, prior to the sensible. In order to be perceived, forms must be constructed, in a structuring of reality.