Abstract
Averroes is often considered to be the last of the great ‘classical’ Islamic philosophers. In this chapter, we will briefly look at Averroes’ defence of the philosophical theses subjected to al-Ghazali’s attack and then in more detail discuss Averroes’ defence of the Falasifa’s guiding meta-philosophy: Islamic moderate Evidentialism. We will then discuss some of the thinkers from the Islamic world who followed Averroes and al-Ghazali, especially those in whose thought some version of Evidentialism either explicitly or implicitly plays a huge role such as Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī (1836–1897), who pave the way for the modern incarnation of Islamic philosophy: political Islam.
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Notes
- 1.
Griffel (2004).
- 2.
This is a view that Saul Kripke seems to share in his famous (1980) Naming & Necessity. See Strohminger and Yli-Vakkuri (forthcoming) for an overview of contemporary views about the epistemology of modality .
- 3.
- 4.
As Herbert Davidson puts it: “Avicenna likewise recognizes, and attaches the name prophecy to, knowledge that results when the emanation from the active intellect —or another supernal being—acts on the human imaginative faculty. But as an extension of his view that man receives intelligible thought directly from an emanation of the active intellect, he, unlike Alfarabi, recognizes, and names as prophecy, genuine theoretical knowledge imparted by the active intellect to the human intellect without the human intellect’s having to employ standard scientific procedures” (Davidson 1992, p. 117). Fazlur Rahman makes the distinction by calling revelation of new knowledge “intellectual revelation” and revelation bringing understanding to existing knowledge “imaginative revelation” (Rahman 1958, p. 36).
- 5.
I’ll say more about this “Straussian” line and Leo Strauss’s political philosophy later in this chapter.
- 6.
As Van den Bergh (2008, p. xxxv) puts it in his translator’s introduction to the Tahafut : “There are three possible views. A Sceptical view that religion is opium for the people, held by certain Greek rationalists; the view that religion expresses Absolute Truth; and the intermediate view, held by Averroes , that the religious conceptions are the symbols of a higher philosophical truth, symbols which have to be taken for reality itself by the non-philosophers”.
- 7.
“a sensible knave … may think that an act of iniquity … will make a considerable addition to his fortune, without causing any considerable breach in the social union … That honesty is the best policy, may be a good general rule, but is liable to many exceptions: and he, it may perhaps be thought, conducts himself with most wisdom, who observes the general rule, and takes advantage of all the exceptions.”
- 8.
That is, neither fully equivocal, but not univocal, but rather “pointing toward” the same thing. For more on pro hens equivocals, especially as taken by Aristotle , see Shields (1999) (he calls the underlying notion “core-dependent homonymy”).
- 9.
“true visions include premonitions of particular events due to occur in future time … this warning foreknowledge comes to people in their sleep from the eternal Knowledge which orders and rules the universe” (Decisive Treatise, p. 55) (my emphasis, to highlight the practical nature of such knowledge for Averroes ).
- 10.
Anscombe (1957).
- 11.
This is why St Thomas is sometimes referred to as a fideist.
- 12.
For a helpful account of the doctrines of the various Latin Averroeists and how their views can be considered to constitute a unified view, see Marebon (2007).
- 13.
Though he is depicted as rather a solitary figure (not involved in discussion as are most the others) and takes the pose of someone who is doing more listening than commenting.
- 14.
For more see Walbridge (2004).
- 15.
These can be substantial or accidental (these latter being what he calls “talismans”).
- 16.
For a circumspect take on the influence of Nazism on Heidegger’s thought see O’Brien (2016).
- 17.
There is a real wealth of undigested, untranslated philosophical work in the Islamic world between this immediate post-al-Ghazali period and the last moments of the Ottoman Empire. We are living in exciting times where this material is beginning to be more widely understood, especially by thinkers in the West.
- 18.
The Mamluks’ Empire (1250–1517) spanned, at its greatest moment, Egypt, parts of North Africa and the Levant.
- 19.
This has been the line of other radical reformers; for instance on feminist reform, the sociologist Fatema Mernissi (1940–2015) has argued that an empowerment of women will come hand in hand with a recovery of Islam’s original teachings (Marnissi 2011). Other feminist writers such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali have been much more critical of Islamic (traditional or otherwise) attitudes towards women. And there have of course been more non-theistic versions of Evidentialist reform movements, such as those of the “Young Turks”, who paved the way towards the establishment of the modern Turkish secular state.
- 20.
Apparently in 1888 on having returned from France, as reported here: https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/07/02/democracy-religion-and-moral-values-a-road-map-toward-political-transformation-in-egypt/.
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Booth, A.R. (2017). The Philosophers Strike Back: Averroes and Islamic Philosophy After al-Ghazali. In: Analytic Islamic Philosophy. Palgrave Philosophy Today. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54157-4_7
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