Arabic Averroès Abou Al-Walid Mohammad ibn Ahmad ibn Mohammad ibn Rochd. He exerted initially functions of justice like cadi, then he devoted himself to philosophy and medicine near his Master Ibn Tofaïl. This one submitted it to the court almohade of Marrakech; in front of the sultan Abou Yaqoub Youssef, Averroès commented on Aristote and, following lbn Tofaïl, became the personal doctor of the sovereign.
Living with Seville, Cordoue, Marrakech, victim of the intellectual atmosphere of its time, and especially of the lawyers malékites, persecuted for his philosophy, he died in exile with Marrakech.
The enthusiastic disciple of Aristote Its treaty of medicine (Colliget) will be famous with the Middle Ages. In Islam, where its philosophical work will remain little known, mainly his treaty of jurisprudence (Bidaya) will be studied. But it is especially as a philosopher that it will influence the Christian Occident, where it penetrated at the beginning of the XII E century, via the Jews, disciples of Maïmonide.
For Thomas d' Aquin, and in spite of his charges of treason with regard to Averroès at the end of its life, this one is the “commentator” par excellence of Aristote, the authority which makes law. Averroès attacker, the Augustinian ones of the XII E century, with Bonaventure saint, will be persuaded to reach Aristote, just as the averroïstes, with Siger, will believe to follow the Greek philosopher. It seems well indeed that Averroès especially aimed at being an enthusiastic disciple of Aristote, whose doctrines seemed to him “the sovereign truth” and of which he could clarify certain badly enlightened aspects.
Maghrebian philosophy and Greek philosophy If Avicenne is one of the most important representatives of the falsafa, of “Moslem Hellenistic philosophy” Eastern (IX e-XI E S.), Averroès was that of the Maghrebian falsafa (XII E S.). Between two the, different one in space and time, the reaction of official Islam had been, with in particular Al-Ghazali. With this one, Averroès answers by Tahafut At-tahafut (“inconsistency of the inconsistency”).
Its notion of “Creation” is more complete than that of Avicenne. God is the principle of all the movement; but it created neither the matter, eternal, nor the forms; nothing can pass from nothing to the being. All is only one immense eternal evolution. Averroès supplements these Aristotelian sights by the Neoplatonic principle that one can produce only one. God produces the first Intelligence, from where then the Intelligences of all the celestial spheres emanate, humblest of those being human Intellect, thinking humanity; it is this principle which makes it possible to the man to think, it is this principle which, with the death of the man, remains as tel. By his theory of knowledge, Averroès thus poses the individual survival of the heart.
Attacked by the Augustinian ones, which is caught some with all the aristotelism, in a way more moderated by Albert the Large one and Thomas d' Aquin, the Latin averroïsme was condemned by the University of Paris and the council of Lateran (1512).
The Egyptian scenario writer Youssef Chahine carried out a free adaptation of the life of Averroès: the Destiny (1997).