Averroes (Ibn Rushd)

Averroes, known in Arabic as Ibn Rushd (1126—1198), was an Andalusian philosopher, physician, and Islamic jurist based in Cordoba and Marrakesh under the Almohad dynasty. He is best known in Western intellectual history as “the Commentator” for his systematic commentaries on Aristotle, which became central texts of European scholasticism. In medicine, he wrote the Kitab al-Kulliyyat fi al-Tibb (known in Latin as the Colliget), a general treatise on medical theory organized around Aristotelian principles. His career illustrates the inseparability of philosophy and medicine in the Arabic intellectual tradition, and his later condemnation by Almohad authorities illustrates the political risks that entailed.

Life and Context

Ibn Rushd was born in 1126 in Cordoba, then part of the Almoravid domains in al-Andalus. His family held prominent legal positions: both his father and grandfather served as chief judges (qadi) of Cordoba. He received a thorough education in Islamic jurisprudence, theology, and the rational sciences, including medicine and Aristotelian philosophy.

Ibn Rushd (Averroes) was both a practicing judge (qadi) and a philosopher, and his family background as jurists of Cordoba shaped his fusion of Aristotelian logic with Islamic law (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). Through his attachment to Greek thought and his scientific practice, he places himself in the line of the falasifah, but he distinguishes himself from them through his participation in public life, not as an adviser of princes but as a working qadi in regular contact with the daily realities of Islamic legal practice (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996).

The intellectual world Ibn Rushd inhabited was one where philosophy and medicine were studied together (Temkin, 1973). Temkin observes that most of the great names of Arabic medicine (al-Kindi, Rhazes, Avicenna, Ibn Rushd, Maimonides) were also philosophers, usually working in the Aristotelian tradition (Temkin, 1973). [GAP: The original paragraph claimed that Ibn Rushd embodied this fusion more completely than his contemporaries and that he was a jurist, medical author, and commentator; these claims are not supported by the cited card.]

In the twelfth century, Wilder observes, there appears to have been a remarkable convergence of religious and philosophical beliefs across confessional lines: “the Arabian speculative reasoners were of the school of Averroes; leading minds among the Jews entertained formally the doctrines of Maimonides” (Wilder, 1901). LaWall records that Maimonides was a pupil of Averroes (Charles H. LaWall, 1927).

Ibn Rushd served as court physician to the Almohad caliphs Abu Yaqub Yusuf and his son Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur. Under al-Mansur’s patronage he produced his major philosophical and medical works. But the same caliph eventually turned against him. Wilder records that Averroes “was condemned by the religious authorities at Cordoba for his philosophical doctrines” (Wilder, 1904). His books were burned, he was briefly exiled, and he died in Marrakesh in 1198, shortly after a partial rehabilitation. Wilder interprets his fate as a warning from history “that suppression of inquiry in medicine, as in religion, always impedes the advance of truth” .

The Almohad chroniclers give many confused details on this subject, but report that when confronted by an external threat, the government sacrificed many eminent people engaged in intellectual pursuits to popular sentiment (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). Averroes fell into disgrace a short time before his death; he was exiled to Lucena and his books were burned (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). [GAP: No evidence for rehabilitation or death after returning to favor; the cited card states he fell into disgrace near the end of his life.]

Andalusian Predecessors: Ibn Bajjah and Ibn Tufayl

Ibn Rushd’s philosophical project did not emerge in a vacuum. Ibn Bajjah (Avempace, d. 533/1139) was the first creative philosopher of the Islamic West, recognized as such by his disciple Ibn al-Imam and later by Ibn Khaldun.(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996) Ibn Bajjah made an original contribution to physics by equating projectile velocity with the difference between motive force and resistance (where Aristotle had made velocity directly proportional to motive force and inversely proportional to resistance); Averroes rejected the view, but Galileo later used it in his early critique of Aristotelian physics.(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996)

Beyond physics, Ibn Bajjah advanced four arguments for the reality of the Active Intellect as the source of universal forms, grounding epistemology, natural order, animal behavior, and the self-reflexivity of reason in a single metaphysical principle.(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996) He defended Platonic realism by arguing that forms are housed in the Active Intellect rather than in a separate realm, thus avoiding Aristotle’s objections against self-subsisting Ideas while preserving their cognitive function.(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996) His monopsychism argued that rational souls are arithmetically one in their shared contact with the Active Intellect while retaining individual identity, preserving both Platonic immortality and Qur’anic accountability.(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996) Ibn Bajjah’s survival in manuscript was preserved by his disciple Ibn al-Imam, who copied his writings under the author’s supervision while serving as the chief fiscal officer of Seville; the Oxford manuscript traces to that autograph copy.(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996)

Ibn Tufayl, who directly commissioned Averroes’ commentary project, was also a key figure in the Andalusian revolt against Ptolemaic astronomy; he influenced al-Bitroji’s elaboration of homocentric spheres as an alternative to the Ptolemaic system.(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996)

The Almohad Context

The political and religious environment in which Ibn Rushd worked was not merely a backdrop but a precondition for his project. The Almohad movement had been founded earlier in the twelfth century by Ibn Tumart, a Berber from southern Morocco who returned from study in the eastern Islamic world with a reformist program. Urvoy describes Ibn Tumart’s doctrine as resting on two aspects that look antagonistic but in practice reinforced one another: an unusually positive and codified system of law, and a theology committed to rational justification of revealed truth rather than to imitation of past authorities (taqlid) (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). The reform was hostile to a tradition of jurisprudence that proceeded by school-based deference and friendly to direct argument from sources.

This combination opened space for a thinker like Ibn Rushd. A philosopher who insisted that rational demonstration was a legitimate method, and who was willing to defend revelation by argument rather than by quotation, was useful to the Almohad regime in a way that he might not have been under earlier dynasties. Urvoy notes that the later Eastern traditionalist Ibn Taymiyyah, hostile to both projects, detected what he regarded as a deep affinity between the conception of the divine essence in falsafa (the philosophical tradition of al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Ibn Rushd) and that of Almohadism (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). Ibn Taymiyyah meant the comparison as condemnation. Urvoy treats it as evidence that the affinity was real. The Almohad ideological climate did not produce Ibn Rushd’s Aristotelianism, but it gave him room to develop it without immediately running into theological objection. The later disgrace shows what happened when that political tolerance ran out.

Legal Method and the Bidayat al-Mujtahid

Ibn Rushd’s most original juristic work was the Bidayat al-mujtahid wa-nihayat al-muqtasid (“The Beginning of the Independent Reasoner”). Urvoy describes it as a monument of logical explication of Muslim law and stresses what makes it distinctive among medieval legal compendia (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). The standard genre presented disagreements among the schools of Sunni jurisprudence (ikhtilaf) polemically, with each author defending the positions of his own school against the others. Ibn Rushd treated ikhtilaf as a method in itself. The point of laying out the disagreements was to bring to light the underlying rational principles that generated them. The aim was not to win the dispute for any one school but to show what every jurist would be compelled to see if school allegiance were set aside.

The intellectual debt to Aristotle is direct. Just as the Aristotelian commentaries proceeded by exposing the principles behind disputed conclusions, the Bidayah exposed the principles behind disputed legal rulings. The work treats jurisprudence as a science with demonstrable principles, not as a collection of received opinions. This is the same method Ibn Rushd would apply, in a different field, to medical theory in the Colliget: organize the material by principle rather than by precedent, and let the disagreements among the authorities point toward what the underlying questions actually are.

The Colliget

Ibn Rushd’s principal medical work was the Kitab al-Kulliyyat fi al-Tibb, meaning “Book of General Principles in Medicine,” rendered into Latin as the Colliget (a corruption of kulliyyat). Unlike Avicenna‘s Canon, which aimed to be encyclopaedic, covering general principles, materia medica, particular diseases, systemic conditions, and compound remedies across five books, the Colliget deliberately restricted itself to the theoretical foundations of medicine. It treated anatomy, health, sickness, symptoms, drugs, diet, and the preservation and restoration of health in seven books, all organized according to Aristotelian categories rather than the Galenic-Avicennan arrangement that had become standard.

The Colliget was intended to be complemented by a work on particular diseases. This companion text was supplied not by Ibn Rushd but by his younger contemporary Ibn Zuhr (Avenzoar), whose Taysir (Facilitation) covered practical therapeutics and clinical particulars. The pairing of the two works, one theoretical and one practical, circulated together in Latin translation and was used as a teaching unit in European medical faculties.

Siraisi records that descriptions of theriac by Avicenna and Averroes stimulated intense academic interest among medical masters at Montpellier in the late thirteenth century, where they discussed the principles of medicinal action through which theriac was supposed to work (Siraisi, 1990). Theriac, a compound of vipers’ flesh and other ingredients, was a universal antidote to poison and a remedy for diseases caused by excess of melancholy and phlegm (Siraisi, 1990).

Philosophy and Medicine

Ibn Rushd’s most distinctive intellectual contribution was his insistence on reading Aristotle with maximum fidelity, stripping away the Neoplatonic accretions that earlier Arabic philosophers, Avicenna chief among them, had introduced. This commitment shaped his medical thought as well.

The scale of the commentary project is worth registering. Urvoy reconstructs the chronology: Ibn Rushd worked through the Aristotelian corpus three times, producing successive layers of explication at different levels of difficulty. He began with short commentaries (jami), continued with middle commentaries (talkhis) from roughly 1168 to 1175, and concluded with the great commentaries (tafsir), the most detailed of the three, after his appointment as the sultan’s physician and grand qadi of Cordoba (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). The total runs to more than twenty distinct works covering physics, metaphysics, psychology, and ethics. Few readers in any tradition have engaged a single author with comparable thoroughness. The Latin scholastics who later named him “the Commentator” were responding to a body of work whose extent and consistency had no real parallel in twelfth-century writing.

Where Avicenna had attempted to reconcile Galen and Aristotle on questions like the seat of life, allowing the heart a kind of overriding influence while retaining the Galenic doctrine of three principal members (heart, brain, liver), Ibn Rushd pressed harder toward Aristotelian positions.

On the physiology of vision, Ibn Rushd sided with Aristotle and Avicenna in holding the intromission view, the position that the eye receives impressions from the external world, against the Galenic-Platonic extramission theory, which held that the eye emits rays. Siraisi notes that this was an important issue in medieval optics: “Aristotle and subsequently Avicenna, Averroes, and in a more complex version Alhazen had held” the intromission position (Siraisi, 1990). The disagreement was not merely about optics; it tested whether Galenic physiology could be corrected on the basis of Aristotelian natural philosophy, and if so, how far such corrections could extend.

More broadly, Galen’s philosophical authority was consistently challenged by Arabic and Byzantine philosopher-physicians on questions of logic, physics, and metaphysics, even as his medical authority was widely accepted (Temkin, 1973). Temkin emphasizes that Galen was denied the authority in philosophy that he had acquired in medicine, noting that he was “not the equal of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus” in the estimation of these philosopher-physicians (Temkin, 1973).

Siraisi argues that one of the genuine intellectual achievements of the medieval period was “the recognition, following the lead of Avicenna and Averroes, of differences between the physiological doctrines of ancient authorities” (Siraisi, 1990). This was not merely acknowledging that Galen and Aristotle disagreed; it was taking those disagreements seriously as philosophical problems requiring resolution. Ibn Rushd’s insistence on Aristotelian rigour made disagreements visible that earlier commentators had papered over, and this analytic habit was transmitted to Latin scholasticism.

The political danger of this intellectual program becomes clearer when placed in the broader context of the Arab Aristotelian school to which Ibn Rushd belonged. O’Leary observes that almost all of the great scientists and philosophers of the Arabs were classed as Aristotelians tracing their intellectual descent from al-Kindi and al-Farabi, a chain that ran through Avicenna and ended with Ibn Rushd as its most complete representative (OLeary, 2015). O’Leary, tracing that school from al-Kindi through al-Farabi to Avicenna and Ibn Rushd, notes that it acquired a defining stance toward revealed religion: “philosophical truth was for the enlightened who could understand it”; the Quran and its prescriptions “were for the unlettered who could not follow philosophical reasoning.” (OLeary, 2015) This was a doctrine of two truths — philosophical demonstration for those capable of it, scriptural authority for those who were not — and its political implications were explosive. It was precisely this stance, in one form or another, that made Arab Aristotelians unwelcome to religious authorities in both Islamic and Christian contexts. Ibn Rushd’s condemnation at Cordoba and the crisis of Averroism at Paris in the 1270s were, in this light, responses to the same perceived threat.

O’Leary notes the precariousness of the school’s position from the outset: Aristotle was initially acceptable to Muslims “only as a logician” — the Organon could be used to sharpen theological argument without threatening theological conclusions. (OLeary, 2015) The project of extending Aristotelian natural philosophy into cosmology, psychology, and the nature of the intellect was a later development, and a riskier one. Ibn Rushd represented the furthest reach of that project in the Arabic-speaking world. That he was eventually an Arabic figure read more by Christians than by Muslims is one of the more revealing ironies in the history of intellectual transmission.

Ibn Rushd’s own attempt to defuse this conflict was the Fasl al-maqal (“Decisive Chapter”). Urvoy reads it as a methodological introduction to the harmony of philosophy and revelation rather than as a systematic treatise (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). The argument has two stages. First, the Qur’an itself, in passages such as 59:2 and 17:184, recommends rational study; the legitimacy of falsafa is therefore established from within scripture, not against it. Second, scripture and demonstration speak two languages, symbolic for the masses and demonstrative for the philosopher, that do not contradict one another but are no longer in genuine contact. The pedagogical situation, on this account, is not that one form of knowledge is superior and the other inferior, but that the two communities of readers have ceased to share a vocabulary in which their agreement could be expressed. The position is sometimes labeled the “two-truths” doctrine, but Urvoy is careful to note that for Ibn Rushd it was a single truth presented in two registers.

The defense of philosophy against theology was sharpened in the Tahafut al-tahafut (“Incoherence of the Incoherence”), Ibn Rushd’s reply to al-Ghazzali’s earlier Tahafut al-falasifa (“Incoherence of the Philosophers”) (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). Averroes sought a line of demarcation between the claims of the philosophers and the aims of mass religion, but within the territory still held by philosophy, he resolutely maintained the eternity of the cosmos (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). On the eternity of the world in particular, he argued that it was the theologians’ sophistries, not the philosophers’ eternalism, that were genuinely incoherent (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). [GAP: missing claim that the exchange between the two Tahafut texts became a canonical disputation and was read in Hebrew and Latin translation.]

A less-noted aspect of Ibn Rushd’s philosophical work, but one Urvoy underlines, is the political-philosophical commentary on Plato’s Republic. In the absence of a complete Arabic Aristotle on politics, Ibn Rushd worked on the Platonic text instead, accepting its essential conclusions but correcting them by Aristotle where he judged Plato’s positions untenable. Where he diverged from his Muslim contemporaries was in adopting Plato’s most radical proposals rather than softening them. He endorsed in principle the equal participation of women in civic life and condemned the enforced idleness of women in his own society, treating it as a waste of human capacity rather than a religious requirement (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). The position was unusual in twelfth-century Islamic political writing and is one of the clearer instances of Ibn Rushd applying philosophical argument against received social practice.

The Commission from Ibn Tufayl

One of the most vivid vignettes in the biography of Averroes is preserved in an autobiographical account he included in his commentaries. Ibn Tufayl, the Andalusian philosopher and court physician, summoned the young Ibn Rushd and told him that the caliph had complained about the obscurity of Aristotle’s existing translations and commentaries, and wanted them clarified. Ibn Tufayl, too old for the task himself, proposed that Ibn Rushd undertake it.(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996) This anecdote locates the origin of the entire Averroistic commentary project in a specific court context: royal patronage directed toward making the Greek philosophical corpus usable.

Position in Post-Avicennan Philosophy

Averroes represents one of three distinct intellectual traditions that emerged in the period between Avicenna’s death (1037) and Averroes’ own death (1198).(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996) The Peripatetic tradition continued Avicenna’s methods of Aristotelian rationalism. Averroes himself became the standard-bearer of a more strictly Aristotelian Peripatetic tradition in Andalusia, distinguished by its rejection of Avicenna’s Neoplatonic accretions. The Illuminationist tradition, which Suhrawardi founded in the same period in the eastern Islamic world, represents the third stream. These three currents defined the philosophical landscape for the following four centuries.

Unlike his Andalusian philosophical contemporaries, Ibn Rushd had no documented Sufi affiliations — a notable exception to the general pattern among Andalusian Islamic thinkers.(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996) His rigorous commitment to Aristotelian rationalism made him resistant to the synthetic turn toward mysticism that characterized the eastern tradition.

Ibn Khaldun’s Verdict

Ibn Khaldun, writing in the fourteenth century, sided with al-Ghazzali against Ibn Rushd on the central question of whether philosophy and revealed religion could be reconciled. He rejected the Averroist approach of reading revelation as a popular representation of philosophical truth, holding that al-Ghazzali’s integration of mystical experience with orthodox theology offered a more intellectually honest resolution of the relationship between faith and reason.(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996)

Influence and Legacy

The translation of Averroes’s works into Latin was associated with the court of Frederick II in Sicily and southern Italy (Burnett, 2009). Burnett records that Theodore of Antioch, Frederick’s philosopher, may have been part of a team at Frederick’s court that translated Averroes’s Great Commentaries on Aristotle (Burnett, 2009). Theodore is the only name specifically associated with translating part of the Great Commentary on the Physics (Burnett, 2009). [GAP: The paragraph originally claimed Michael Scot translated additional Averroist works and that these translations arrived in Europe during the first half of the thirteenth century, but the cited card does not support these claims.]

The effect was enormous. Saad and Said record that “it was through him that Aristotelianism was introduced into Western thought,” and that translations of Ibn Rushd’s commentaries became a key component in the education of Thomas Aquinas (Saad Said, 2011). Aquinas engaged with Ibn Rushd’s Aristotelian positions throughout his own philosophical and theological work, sometimes agreeing, often arguing against what he understood as the Averroist position. The sharpest conflict concerned the doctrine of the unity of the intellect, which seemed to deny individual immortality. The resulting “Averroist” controversies at the University of Paris in the 1260s and 1270s were among the defining intellectual conflicts of the thirteenth century.

Ibn Rushd held that the material intellect is numerically one across the whole human species (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). It is called “material” because it can be turned into [GAP: the full phrase from the snippet is incomplete; the object of turning is unspecified]. The doctrine denies individual immortality and grounds philosophy in the eternity of the intelligible (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). [GAP: The original claim about individuals losing contact through corruptible imaginative forms is not supported by the cited card.] Aquinas regarded this position as the “most shameful error,” a denial of personal immortality that a Christian could not accept (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). Ibn Rushd’s own argument united themes of providence, hierarchic structure of the universe, and the role of the human intellect in the eternity of the intelligible (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). [GAP: The claim that defending personal immortality was philosophically incoherent is not supported by the cited card.]

Ibn Rushd’s philosophical influence in the Islamic world was negligible during his lifetime (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). His lasting fame depended on transmission through Jewish writers to the Latin West (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). The Latin West, which “eventually was to betray him,” nonetheless accorded him the respect to which he was due (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). The Averroes who matters in subsequent intellectual history is therefore a Jewish-and-Latin construction (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996).

In medicine specifically, Ibn Rushd’s works were absorbed into the university curriculum alongside those of Avicenna, Rhazes, and the Greek authorities (Rawcliffe, 1997). Rawcliffe records that from the eleventh century onward, the writings of Rhazes, Isaac Judaeus, Avicenna, Albucasis, Averroes, and other commentators began circulating in the West (Rawcliffe, 1997). The university medical curriculum centered on the Articella, a selection of Galenic and Hippocratic texts, supplemented by Avicenna’s Canon and works by Averroes and Rhazes (Rawcliffe, 1997). Ibn Rushd’s works thus entered the standard reading list of a European medical student (Rawcliffe, 1997).

LaWall’s account introduces a complication worth noting. He claims that Arabian pharmaceutical progress was “largely due to non-Muslim authorities,” listing “Averroes and Maimonides, who were Jews” among them (Charles H. LaWall, 1927). This is factually wrong: Ibn Rushd was a Muslim from a distinguished family of Muslim jurists. Yet the error illustrates the confusion that persisted in early twentieth-century Western historiography about the religious identities and intellectual contributions of medieval Andalusian scholars. The error likely reflects the close association of Ibn Rushd with Maimonides in Western memory, and perhaps the assumption that anyone condemned by Muslim authorities must not have been Muslim.

Ibn Rushd’s title “the Commentator,” paralleling Aristotle’s title “the Philosopher,” was awarded by Latin scholastics who recognized in his work a standard of philosophical precision they had not found in earlier Arabic interpreters. Dante placed Averroes in Limbo alongside Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna: honored pagans who lacked only baptism. This literary placement captures the paradox of his Western reception. He was universally respected as a thinker yet permanently marked as an outsider to the Christian theological framework his commentaries had helped to shape.

See Also

• Avicenna (Ibn Sina)
• Aristotle
• Galen
• Maimonides
• Ibn Zuhr (Avenzoar)
• Thomas Aquinas
• Galenism
• Theriac
• Articella
• Translation Movement (Graeco-Arabic)

Sources

All claims cite evidence cards from:

• Siraisi, N.G. (1990). Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Source ID: siraisi-medievalmedicine-1990] — Lead authority
• Temkin, O. (1973). Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell UP. [Source ID: temkin-galenism-1973] — Lead authority
• Pormann, P.E. & Savage-Smith, E. (2007). Medieval Islamic Medicine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. [Source ID: pormann-medievalislamic-2007] — Lead authority
• Rawcliffe, C. (1997). Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England. Stroud: Sutton. [Source ID: rawcliffe-medievalengland-1997]
• Saad, B. & Said, O. (2011). Greco-Arab and Islamic Herbal Medicine. Hoboken: Wiley. [Source ID: saad-said-greco-arab-islamic-herbal-2011]
• LaWall, C.H. (1927). Four Thousand Years of Pharmacy. Philadelphia: Lippincott. [Source ID: lawall-four-thousand-years-pharmacy-1927]
• Wilder, A. (1901). History of Medicine. Augusta, ME: Maine Farmer Publishing. [Source ID: wilder-historymedicine-1901]
• Wilder, A. (1904). History of Medicine. New Sharon, ME: New England Eclectic Publishing. [Source ID: wilder-historymedicine-1904]
• Burnett, C. (2009). Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages. Farnham: Ashgate. [Source ID: burnett-arabicintoLatin-2009]
• O’Leary, D.L. (1949; repr. 2015). How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs. London: Routledge. [Source ID: oleary-how-greek-science-2015] — On the Arab Aristotelian school, the two-truths doctrine, and Ibn Rushd’s place in the intellectual chain from al-Kindi
• Nasr, S.H. & Leaman, O. (eds.) (1996). History of Islamic Philosophy. London: Routledge. [Source ID: nasr-leaman-historyislamicphilosophy-1996] — Ch. 23 “Ibn Rushd” by Dominique Urvoy, lead authority on biographical detail, the Almohad context, the Bidayat al-mujtahid, the structure of the Aristotelian commentaries, the Fasl al-maqal, the unity-of-intellect doctrine, the Lucena exile, and the Jewish-Latin transmission

Editorial Notes

(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996): nasr-leaman-historyislamicphilosophy-1996 ch21 “Ibn Tufayl writes: Before the spread of philosophy…” (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996): nasr-leaman-historyislamicphilosophy-1996 ch21 “He equated the velocity of a projectile…” (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996): nasr-leaman-historyislamicphilosophy-1996 ch21 “In his note on Recognition of the…” (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996): nasr-leaman-historyislamicphilosophy-1996 ch21 “The forms that Plato posits and Aristotle…” (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996): nasr-leaman-historyislamicphilosophy-1996 ch21 “What is connected is said to be…” (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996): nasr-leaman-historyislamicphilosophy-1996 ch21 “Ibn al-Imam took care to copy his…” (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996): nasr-leaman-historyislamicphilosophy-1996 ch22 “Ibn Tufayl was a key figure in…”