Ibn Rushd

Their big question

Can thinking and believing disagree?

Ibn Rushd’s whole position can be put in three words: truth does not contradict truth. If reasoning leads somewhere and something else also seems true, then either the reasoning is faulty or the other thing has been misread. One of them has to give, and it is the philosopher’s job to find out which.

This is why he spent years answering Al-Ghazali’s attack on philosophy rather than dismissing it. Al-Ghazali had argued that the philosophers claimed a certainty they did not have. Ibn Rushd’s reply was that they had been sloppy in places and right in others, and that attacking philosophy with bad arguments gives nobody permission to stop reasoning. He was happy to admit his side had made mistakes; what he would not accept was the conclusion that inquiry should stop.

He gave a distinctive answer to whom each route is for. Some people are persuaded by arguments, some by images and stories, some by the plain sense of the text. He thought all three were legitimate, and that the mistake was demanding the same form of proof from everybody — that is how you get arguments in which nobody is addressing anybody.

He is one of the clearest cases of philosophy as a genuinely connected conversation rather than a set of separate national traditions. He read Greek, argued with a Persian, wrote in Arabic, was read in Latin, and made Aristotle available to medieval Europe. A thousand years separate him from the Greeks and a continent from the Europeans, and the argument is continuous.

“Truth does not contradict truth.”

A summary of his central claim that reason and revelation are two routes to the same truth, so neither can refute the other.

Three things worth knowing

• He was a judge as well as a philosopher, working in law and medicine as well as in philosophy, and served as a court physician.
• He wrote detailed commentaries on Aristotle that were translated into Latin and taught in European universities for centuries.
• He wrote a reply to Al-Ghazali — The Incoherence of the Incoherence — and spent years dismantling an argument rather than ignoring it.

Try it — think like Ibn

Take two things you believe that seem to pull against each other. Write down what each one is actually claiming. Often the quarrel disappears once both are said plainly.

We have no portrait of Ibn that is both authentic and free to use, so this page uses a drawn mark rather than an invented face. About the pictures.