Viewed as a faculty or method of treating language without any specific content.
#Al ghazali poetry series#
This version departed considerably from the Western manuscript, and is partly responsible for the altered form of Aristotle’s ideas transmitted through Ibn Rushd’s Commentary (MLC, 81-82).Īs mentioned earlier, Arab philosophers such al-Farabi (whose Catalogue of the Sciences was twice translated into Latin in the twelfth century) followed late Greek commentators in viewing Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics as part of his Organon or series of logical treatises. But this was not the version that influenced the Mediaeval West the version that had such an impact on the Middle Ages was Arabic, a tenth century translation of a Greek manuscript dating before the year 700.
The oldest surviving manuscript in the West dates from the eleventh century. Not long after the death of Aristotle, the text of his Poetics effectively vanished for most of the late classical and early Mediaeval periods, it was not known except through intermediaries such as Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus. It was printed in 1481, the first version of Aristotle’s text published during the Renaissance. The text of Ibn Rushd to be considered here is his Commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle, translated into Latin in 1256 by Hermannus Alemannus, a monk living in Toledo. There is a story that the prince asked him whether philosophers considered the world to be created in time or eternal, a conversation that instigated Ibn Rushd’s commentaries on the Greek philosophers. Around 1153 he was introduced by his friend, the philosopher Ibn Tufayl, to a prince of the Almohad court. Ironically, and sadly for the subsequent history of Islamic thought, Ibn Rushd’s influence in the Islamic world was far smaller than his impact on Christian Europe he failed to convince Islamic scholars and theologians of the propriety of philosophy within their religious visions.11īorn into a family of jurists, Ibn Rushd was trained in law and became a judge in Seville and Cordova. Ironically, it was misinterpretations of Ibn Rushd’s teachings by the Latin “Averroists” - who viewed him as believing that faith and reason were irreconcilable - that provoked the response of Aquinas’ philosophy, which labored to harmonize these domains. While in general, Ibn Rushd believed that philosophy yields truths which are certain, he argues not for a religion of pure reason but rather for a philosophical and rational understanding of the truths of revealed religion. The central endeavor of Ibn Rushd’s own major philosophical treatises, such as the Incoherence of the Incoherence (which attempted to refute al-Ghazali’s attack on philosophy, The Incoherence of the Philosophers), is to reconcile philosophy and religion, reason and revelation. It was through Ibn Rushd that the main corpus of Aristotle’s texts was transmitted to Europe. In his interpretations of Aristotle, he attempted to remove the elements of neo-Platonism that had hitherto distorted previous Arabic readings of the Greek philosopher. He also wrote extensive commentaries on Plato’s Republic and Porphyry’s Isagoge. Nearly all of his commentaries on Aristotle’s major works were translated into Latin, and some into Hebrew. The Islamic philosopher and jurist Ibn Rushd is known primarily for his great commentaries on Aristotle, which had a profound impact on the Mediaeval West, where he gained wide recognition among both Christian and Jewish scholars.