Was Ibn Rushd an Averroist? The Problem, the Debate, and Its Philosophical Implications
Modern scholars disagree about the extent to which the historical Ibn Rushd actually defended the ideas commonly associated with Averroism and whether his philosophical ideas were controversial in his own day and age. The medieval sources mention persecut
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Was Ibn Rushd an Averroist? The Problem, the Debate, and Its Philosophical Implications Anna Akasoy
Preliminary remark: The purpose of this contribution is not to discuss, let alone answer the question whether or not or in what sense Ibn Rushd was an Averroist. The problem has been discussed by several erudite scholars, and I am unable to contribute additional insights based on newly discovered or analysed source material. My aim is rather to explore the parameters which have determined the debate so far. Before we can determine the impact of certain philosophical ideas from the Islamic world in Western Europe, we need to reach an agreement about whether or not these ideas existed in the Islamic world in the first place, and if they did, in what shape and what was the position of the men who defended them. The deep divides among scholars studying the history of Islamic/Arabic philosophy have often made it impossible to reach such an agreement, especially in the case of controversial ideas.1 The purpose of this contribution is to take the debate around the origin of
The argument presented in this article was first developed in a contribution for a workshop at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) on the transmission of radical ideas from the Islamic world to the West. I would like to thank the organisers, Patricia Crone, Jonathan Israel, and Martin Mulsow, as well as the participants for their responses. 1 The question whether falsafa should be rendered as Islamic or Arabic philosophy has at least two levels. One of them concerns the body of texts: while ‘Arabic philosophy’ seems to exclude texts written in other languages of the Islamicate world, ‘Islamic philosophy’ seems to exclude Arabic texts written by Jewish and Christian authors which are part of the same tradition. The second level concerns the nature of the philosophy and its possible religious implications. For those who use the term ‘Islamic philosophy’ consciously, Islam is key and led to various strategies of harmonisation, while those who speak of ‘Arabic philosophy’ tend to suggest that the religious context is accidental. For the sake of convenience both terms are combined here. While I believe that the question of the body of texts is valid and important for the terminology, I doubt (as should become more obvious below) that this is a particularly useful battlefield for debating a much more complex set of questions. A. Akasoy (*) Ruhr University Bochum e-mail: [email protected] A. Akasoy and G. Giglioni (eds.), Renaissance Averroism and Its Aftermath: Arabic Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 211, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5240-5_16, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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Averroism in the Islamic world as a starting point for analysing some of these divides. For this purpose, I found it useful to explore some of the methodological debates among scholars of the history of Western philosophy since some of the different tend
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