Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Among the distinguished contributors to medicine at this time, though more a philosopher than a physician, is the famous Averroës, whose full Arabic name among his contemporaries was Abul-Welid Mohammed Ben Ahmed Ibn Roschd el-Maliki. Like Avenzoar, of whom he was the intimate personal friend, and Abulcasis and Maimonides, he was born in the south of Spain.
He would speak of forms following matter, as Averroes calls them, answered Epistemon. Right, said Friar John. I will not offer to solve this problem, said Pantagruel; for it is somewhat ticklish, and you can hardly handle it without coming off scurvily; but I will tell you what I have heard.
The Arab writer whose influence on mediaeval thought was the most profound was Averroes, the great commentator on Aristotle. THE most striking intellectual phenomenon of the thirteenth century is the rise of the universities. Monastic and collegiate schools, seats of learning like Salernum, student guilds as at Bologna, had tried to meet the educational needs of the age.
Moses of Narbonne wrote an important commentary on the "Guide," and is likewise the author of a number of works on the philosophy of Averroes, of whom he was a great admirer. The translations of Judah Ibn Tibbon, the father of translators as he has been called, go back indeed to the latter half of the twelfth century, and Abraham Ibn Ezra translated an astronomical work as early as 1160.
Levi ben Gerson takes up the same question of the nature of the material intellect and discusses the various views with more rigor and minuteness than any of his Jewish predecessors. His chief source was Averroes. All these three writers pretended to expound Aristotle's views of the passive intellect rather than propound their own. And Levi ben Gerson discusses their ideas before giving his own.
"No, it is in the ancient Arabic character; that into which the works of Aristotle were translated as far back as the ninth century of our era. It is a curious treatise by the Arabic sage, Ibn Jasher, who was the teacher of Ibn Zohr, who was the teacher of Averroes.
In one of its forms, as we have seen, this idea was developed by Chakia Mouni, in India, in a most masterly manner, and embodied in the vast practical system of Buddhism; in another, it was with less power presented among the Saracens by Averroes. But, perhaps we ought rather to say that Europeans hold Averroes as the author of this doctrine, because they saw him isolated from his antecedents.
More, inserted in the Sadducisimus Triumphatus, "had so much ado to overcome a temptation as that to the opinion of Averroes, that, as extinguished candles go all out in an illuminated air, so separated souls go all into one common anima mundi, and lose their individuation." With these and similar "temptations" Baxter struggled long, earnestly, and in the end triumphantly.
The occasion is perhaps a good one to say a few words on the relations between Mr Arnold and M. Renan, though the latter is not so prominent in the Continental letters as Sainte-Beuve and M. Scherer are. His contributions to the Débats and the Revue des Deux Mondes began to be collected soon after 1850, and his first remarkable single book, Averroès et l'Averroisme, dates from that year.
Averroes in particular, who gained the distinction of being the commentator par excellence of Aristotle, was responsible for this mode of interpretation; and he had his followers among the Masters of Arts in the University of Paris.
Word Of The Day