Esemplastic thermoplastic

Ibn Rashd (1126-1198), known in Europe as Averroës, was the Islamic religious philosopher remembered for bringing the attention of the 12th century Europe to the works of Aristotle, and thus passing the torch of Renaissance from the Islamic Empire which faced the end of its Golden Age, to Europe, which was nearing the end of its Dark Ages.

Aristotle’s works were unknown in Europe at the time, but they remained a hot topic in the Islamic Empire, especially after the 9th century works of Alkindus (Al-Kindi), 10th century commentary of Alpharabius (Al-Farabi), and the subsequent Avicenna (Ibn Sina)’s synthesis of Aristotle’s works with Neoplatonism and the older Islamic philosophy, Kalam. Avicenna’s philosophy dominated the world for the following century, and it was the popular Sufi criticism of Avicennism, “The Incoherence of the Philosophers”, that inspired Averroës to counter it with his “The Incoherence of the Incoherence” and the following three-level commentary on every single work of Aristotle and on Plato’s Republic. Those commentaries were translated in Latin and arrived to Christian Europe from Spain, where they were written, and that’s how European scholastics began.

I actually think that The Incoherence of the Philosophers made perfectly valid points: the philosophers did not use the same methods for physics and astronomy as they did for metaphysics, but at the time, there was no true distinction between philosophical and scientific knowledge. And, of course, the views about God that the philosophers at the time had, were indeed internally irrational, did not hold scrutiny, and were unavoidably heretical if followed through. Unfortunately, in the theocratic world of Islamic Empire, agreeing with that work meant that both philosophy and science had to be abandoned in favor of pure faith.

In the eyes of Averroës, religion and philosophy led to the same ultimate truth, but religion taught it through metaphor, signs, and symbols, available for the uneducated masses, while philosophy reached for the same end with pure reason, only comprehensible by the select few. In his mind philosophy superseded religion and held better understanding of the world. Of course he did not condemn religious instruction, because he would thereby deprive the masses of their only means of obtaining the knowledge of the Absolute. Naturally, the European theologians found some of the philosophical conclusions of Averroës to be heretical, and when the Roman Catholic Church condemned him in 1270, it used the reasoning found in Incoherence of the Philosophers against him, in addition to responding to his directly anti-christian positions, such as monopsychism. Fortunately, the Church had Thomas Aquinas and other scholastics, who found ways to appease Catholicism and allow natural philosophy and, then, science, to develop in Europe.