AVERROES (a corruption of IBN-ROSHD), the most illustrious of Arabian philosophers, was born, according to
El Ansari, in the year of the Hegira 520 (A.D. 1120), at Cordova, of one of the best families in Andalusia. His grandfather and father successively held the office of cafi in Cordova, a dignity which Averroes himself also enjoyed for many years. After studying theology and jurisprudence, he applied himself with zeal to mathematics, medicine, and philosophy. His preceptor in the latter was the celebrated Avenpace (Ibn-Badja). The sudden overthrow of the dynasty of the Almohades in 1130 by the Almohades was favourable to the interests of science; and Averroes enjoyed, with his friends Ibn-Tofail and Ibn-Zohar, the patronage successively of Abdal-Mumen, Yusuf, and Almansur. In 1169 he was appointed cafi of Seville, and about this time he began to employ his leisure in the composition of the works to which he owes his celebrity. In 1182 he was called to Morocco, to fill the office of physician to the Sultan Yusuf; but some time after returned to Spain as cafi of Cordova. Under Yusuf's son, Almansur, he long enjoyed the highest favour; but towards the close of his life the jealousy of his enemies procured his banishment to Elisana (Lucena), a town not far from Cordova. The charge brought against him was that he corrupted the minds of his pupils by impious and heterodox doctrines. Another version attributes his disgrace to a careless expression in his commentary on Aristotle's Zoology, which had offended the pride of Almansur. He had called the sultan simply King of the Berbers, which was construed into an insult to the sovereign both of Spain and of Morocco. Averroes, however, was soon restored to favour, and returned once more to the court of Morocco, where he died in 1198, at an advanced age.
The fame of Averroes is mainly connected with his commentaries on the works of Aristotle, which procured him the same title bestowed in a former age on Alexander the Aphrodisian, of The Commentator. To this distinction, alike by the extent and the quality of his labours, he is well entitled. Without pretending to found a system distinct from that of his great master, he modified with the rest of the Arabian philosophers the Aristotelian doctrines, by the infusion of new elements derived from Neo-Platonism. It may be mentioned, that Averroes wrote also a commentary on the Republic of Plato. Though professedly a Mussulman, the tendency of his doctrines was such as not unreasonably to call his orthodoxy in question. Holding that what was true in religion was not necessarily so in philosophy, he seems to have regarded the one as but a system of exoteric doctrine, of which the other was the proper interpreter and the final consummation.
Arabian philosophy attained its culminating point in Averroes, and after him no eminent name is found in its history. His doctrines were long of high authority in the Jewish and even in the Christian schools. They gave rise in the thirteenth century to great contentions, which continued till the sixteenth century, when Leo X. issued a bull against them in 1512. The disputes were carried on principally between the followers of Alexander of Aphrodisias, or Alexandrians, and the Averroists, or professed disciples of the Arabian philosopher. One of the chief points on which the latter laid themselves open to the charge of heresy, was the immortality of the soul. Among others Albert the Great and Aquinas wrote treatises against the principles of Averroes.
Many of the treatises of Averroes have never been printed. The first complete Latin edition of his works, containing also the Latin of the Aristotelian text, is that of Mantinus, a Jewish physician, in 11 vols. fol., Venice, 1552. The first eight volumes contain the Commentaries; the ninth, besides two other treatises, the Destruction of the Destruction, written in reply to Algazel (see ALGHAZALI); and the tenth is chiefly taken up with his great medical work the Colliget (Kulliyat). The last contains miscellaneous treatises. There have been numerous
Averrunci editions of separate treatises of Averroes. (Brucker, Hist. Crit. iv. 62, Leipz.; Tennemann, Geschichte der Philos.; Dict. de Sc. Philos.; Wüstenfeld, Geschichte der Arab. Aertze, Götting. 1840; Renan's Averroes et l'Averroïsme, Paris, 1852.)