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In Europe, separate states acquired legitimacy; in Islam the universal caliphate and 'umma retained the fullest respect. Muslim philosophers, not unlike Augustine and Hobbes, derived the need for the Shari'a and caliph from the strife-prone nature of humans. Some Western thinkers adopted the view of Cicero (and later of Locke) that human society and the state develop by consensus. Marsilius of Padua's theory of the state in some ways resembled the Muslim theory of the caliphate; he was probably influenced by Ibn Rushd, but Marsilius was without influence. Muslims, drawing on Iranian monarchical theory, saw the ruler's responsibilities as extending to the social and economic infrastructure. Europeans saw the state, Muslims the caliphate, as impersonal offices.

Who can know? Who can merely believe on faith? Who should be kept in the dark entirely? This chapter considers various episodes from the history of philosophy—Locke, Aquinas, Averroes, Maimonides, al-Ghazali—where one or another such division of epistemic labour has been affirmed. It ends by considering the case that can be made for keeping secret some philosophical doctrines.

This chapter examines the structure of Petrarch's De Sui Ipsius et Multorum Ignorantia and his opinion on philosophers Epicurus and Averroës' views on the immortality of the soul. It discusses Petrarch's views on Epicurus and Averroës in the invective on ignorance in order to reach an overall perspective on his mature views of the intellectual life. It analyses De Ignorantia and suggests that it is appropriate to be run through with elements taken from both academic and popular Christianity given its concern with salvation and with the relationship between God and humanity.

Earlier Western researchers have often assumed that the history of Arabic-Islamic philosophy ended with Averroes at the turn to the 13th century and that al-Ghazali’s critique of philosophy in his Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahafut al-falasifa) was responsible for its rapid decline. In reality, however, al-Ghazali did not destroy the tradition of Aristotelian philosophy in Islam, rather he integrated it into the Muslim theological discourse and was thus an active part of the “naturalization” of the Greek science in Islam.

The Introduction discusses who Averroes was, what he did, and his reputation for being Aristotle's most faithful interpreter. Averroes' three commentaries on Aristotle's treatises are introduced. The aims and ideas of the book are briefly summarized.

This chapter discusses the micro-ontology of the image. It explains why the science of the sensible is a form of regional ontology, capable of positing another kind of being, the being of the images beyond the being of things, of mind and of consciousness. Scholasticism has long wondered about the principles of this “special ontology.” According to medieval theologians such as Roger Bacon and Avicenna, images had a minor being, inferior to the thing of which they are the image. To speak of images therefore means to engage in micro-ontology; that is, to speak about the weaker and more fragile form of being which exists in the universe. Placing the real being in opposition to the weak, minor being of images is not a way of dealing with what modernity has come to call the imaginary. This chapter concludes by citing Averroes's claim that the being of images is something in between the being of things and the being of souls, between bodies and spirit.

This chapter surveys the impact of Muslim culture on conceptions of just war and the righteous warrior in the literature and laws of medieval Christian Spain. The first part contrasts the image of Islam in The Song of Roland and in The Poem of the Cid. These two works highlight the contrast between the parochialism of French chivalry and the pluralism of Spain. The second section is an analysis of Las Siete Partidas, a legal code dating from the reign of Alfonso X of Castile (1252–84). The possibility of a link between Spanish “pluralism” and the Malikite inclination to interpret shari‘a with an eye to the public good seems to underlie the more accommodating tendencies of Averroes. The final section focuses on the work of Vitoria, Soto, and the Second Scholastic as an attempt to reinvigorate pluralism against the imperial claims of both the papacy and the Habsburgs. The rise of Grotius marks a defeat in which the lawyers of an emerging Europe of nation-states triumph over the Aristotelian moral theology of Aquinas and the Second Scholastic.

This chapter considers the relationship between matter and extension. Scholastic authors held a wide range of views in this domain, with some divorcing matter and extension entirely, and others treating matter as intrinsically extended.

This chapter explores the remarkable phenomenon of twelfth-century rigorous Andalusian Aristotelianism. In the early twelfth century, the philosophical map of al-Andalus was dramatically redrawn. Along with what can only be described as the blossoming of Islamic philosophy after its constrained state in the previous century, one notices a significant shift to an orthodox version of Aristotelian philosophy. The thought of the Eastern Aristotelians was sprinkled with un-Aristotelian elements. Largely in response to Platonizing authors, especially Avicenna, Andalusian falāsifa explicitly identified with the Peripatetic tradition, and strove to strengthen the authority of Aristotle and his commentators. This stricter version of Aristotelianism, which makes its debut with Ibn Bājja under the Almoravids, was further crystalized under the Almohads by philosophers such as Averroes and Maimonides. The chapter also considers “the Andalusian revolt against Ptolemaic astronomy.” The term “Andalusian Revolt” was first coined in 1984 by Abdelhamid Sabra in his discussion of astronomical theories that attempted to dethrone Ptolemy's astronomy from its almost unquestioned authority.

Canto 36 functions as a kind of still point amidst the political and historical material imbuing Eleven New Cantos: the Continental Congress of 1774-89 and Siena under the rule of Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany and Holy Roman Emperor. The greater part of the poem comprises Pound’s final authoritative translation of Guido Cavalcanti’s canzone ‘Donna mi prega,’ followed by two verse paragraphs dealing with the intellectual and poetic provenance of Guido’s ideas. The nature of these ideas is broadly well known: for Pound, Guido’s philosophical vocabulary transmits certain aspects of Neoplatonism as well as the psychology implied in Aristotle’s De anima. As Pound explains in his essay ‘Cavalcanti’ in Make It New (1934), Guido received these ideas directly or otherwise from a variety of sources, notably John Scottus Eriugena and Robert Grosseteste on one hand, and the great medieval Islamic tradition of Avicenna and Averroes on the other. This essay explores this terrain in more detail, providing greater context for Pound’s claims of intellectual provenance in a close reading of the poem. The Islamic inheritance in particular is far more complex than has been acknowledged, and certainly well beyond Pound’s explicit understanding of the matter. However he was right to place great emphasis on Cavalcanti’s vocabulary: attention to the ways in which Avicenna and Averroes understood the concepts of the diafan, the agent and possible intellects, and the mechanism by which the individual soul makes contact with divine intelligence, all clarify the argument as set out in Cavalcanti’s poem and represented in Pound’s translation. This clarification also makes more explicit the links with the lines following Pound’s translation concerning Eriugena and the Italian Troubadour Sordello da Goito.

The Greek atomist philosophers claimed that material images (eidola) distinguish themselves from objects and infiltrate the eyes to cause vision. Aristotle rejected the material nature of eidola and looked for a medium between object and eye. Colors on the surface of objects can set the transparent in motion and thereby transmit their quality to the eye. Aristotle's theory was defended in the late Middle Ages by Mid-eastern philosophers Avicenna and Averroës, and, mainly via southern Spain, this theory established itself in European thought. People with color vision take for granted an immediate connection between color stimulus and perceptual result. Thus, this developed the idea to define color experiences by quantitative description of the stimuli.

The initial Arabic translation movement took place with the expansion of the Islamic empire during the eighth and ninth centuries (in the Western calendar) during the ʿAbbasid caliphate, which introduced Greek, Hindi, and Persian works into Islamic learning. Where the work of Plato, Aristotle, Euclid and Galen, as well as Hindi mathematics was largely absent from the medieval West, it inspired much learning among Muslim scholars and gave rise to great libraries, with the translation process adding its own emphasis to how the intellectual properties of a text were to be conveyed and engaged across cultures and languages. In particular, the work of al-Kindī, Avicenna, and Averroës on Aristotle’s On the Soul, wrestled with the collective and individual nature of the soul in ways that further the concept of intellectual properties. The Arabic-Latin translation movement of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, through centers such as Toledo, Salerno, Sicily, and Antioch, brought together Muslim, Jew, and Christian (particularly in the Iberian Peninsula) to render much of Islamic learning into Latin, capturing both the ancient texts from Greek and the Islamic commentaries, which proved especially valuable in the teaching of Aristotle and company for centuries to come in Europe.

This chapter considers the content of teaching at the Islamic University of Medina, from the time of its founding and over the decades that followed. While IUM syllabuses were from the start strongly influenced by Wahhabi norms, the bodies of knowledge that were to be transmitted to its students underwent certain subtle shifts over time. These shifts in many ways map onto, and no doubt in part reflect, the broader evolution of the Wahhabi tradition in the second half of the twentieth century. However, the chapter highlights evidence that they also related to the university’s status as a node within a transnational religious economy and its engagement in far-reaching struggles to steer the course of the Islamic tradition.

This chapter seeks to examine the life of Elijah ben Solomon, and his contribution to modern Jewish history. Widely known as the “Genius,” he lived most of his life in the Lithuanian city of Vilna. It is in Vilna where he would make significant contributions on Jewish literature. He mastered the Jewish canon to the extent that there is hardly or no major rabbinic or kabbalistic text untouched by his masterful commentary. The chapter argues that his originality, command of sources, and clarity of thought place him among religious luminaries such as Aquinas and Averroes.

Teleological explanation is one of the legacies of antiquity that received a surprisingly muted response in the Middle Ages. Aristotle’s naturalized approach to teleology met with little enthusiasm, and grave doubts arose in the later Middle Ages over whether final causes are a legitimate kind of cause at all. This was a natural reaction to the distinctive feature of medieval teleology, which is that teleological causes are universal, intelligent, particular, forward-looking, intentional, and (in nonrational cases) extrinsic. When teleology is so understood, its explanatory role becomes limited to certain special cases. Indeed, the one place where reflection on ends plays a truly robust role in later medieval philosophy is in ethics. Even here, however, the consensus of antiquity—that human beings are and ought to be ultimately motivated by their own happiness—meets with growing resistance and eventually outright rejection.

This chapter examines three stories by Jorge Luis Borges: “Funes: His Memory,” “Averroës's Search,” and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Each of these highlights the intricate nature of concepts and replication in the broad sense. The common theme running through these three stories is the word–world relation and the problems this relation generates. In each story, Borges explores one aspect of the process of conceptualization, an endeavor that has engaged philosophers ever since ancient Greece and is still at the center of contemporary philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. Together, Borges's stories present a complex picture of concepts and processes of conceptualization.

After an outline of the views on happiness of Aristotle and some of Aquinas’s immediate predecessors his theology of human fulfilment is outlined. Aquinas rejects both Albert’s view that philosophical contemplation on earth could possibly constitute real happiness and Bonaventure’s more affective notion of prayerful, meditative union with God. Some scholars have pointed to the tension between Aquinas’s accounts of knowing on earth and the vision of God in the afterlife. The former hinges on an Aristotelian empirical stance; the latter appears more illuminist, if not Averroist (in terms of the divine intellect becoming united with the human intellect). This chapter argues that the intuitus simplex (the climax of our intellectual contemplation on earth) resembles, and points towards, the intuitive, non-discursive beatific vision of God. This means that the acme of our mode of knowing on earth, i.e. the moment of intellective insight, has an eschatological dimension. It is one more instance of grace perfecting nature.