“This collection of essays brings us a wonderfully rich and multifaceted view that does justice to the elusive character of Averroes’s figure and to the extent to which it has shaped Western culture. … The high quality of all these essays is evident and the book will be of profit to many scholars with different interests.” (Lucian Petrescu, Journal for Early Modern Studies, Vol. 5 (1), 2016)
While the transmission of Greek philosophy and science via the Muslim world to western Europe in the Middle Ages has been closely scrutinized, the fate of the Arabic philosophical and scientific legacy in later centuries has received less attention, a fault this volume aims to correct. The authors in this collection discuss in particular the radical ideas associated with Averroism that are attributed to the Aristotle commentator Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) and challenge key doctrines of the Abrahamic religions.
This volume examines what happened to Averroes’s philosophy during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Did early modern thinkers really no longer pay any attention to the Commentator? Were there undercurrents of Averroism after the sixteenth century? How did Western authors in this period contextualise Averroes and Arabic philosophy within their own cultural heritage? How different was the Averroes they created as a philosopher in a European tradition from Ibn Rushd, the theologian, jurist and philosopher of the Islamic tradition?
About the Author
Anna Akasoy, PhD in Oriental Studies (2005) at the University of Frankfurt, specializes in the history of Islamic intellectual history and contacts between the Islamic world and other cultures. In 2005, she joined the Warburg Institute as a research assistant. In 2008, she joined the University of Oxford as a departmental lecturer in Islamic history and thought and remained as British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the Oriental Institute. In 2012, she is a visiting research fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg ‘Dynamics in the History of Religions’ at the Ruhr University (Bochum, Germany). Guido Giglioni is the Cassamarca Lecturer in Neo-Latin Cultural and Intellectual History at the Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He obtained his PhD in History of Science and Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (2002). He then received a post-doctoral Research Fellowship at the Dibner Institute, MIT, Boston. He has published a book on Jan Baptiste vanHelmont (Immaginazione e malattia, Milan 2000), one on Francis Bacon (Francesco Bacone, Rome 2011), and edited a volume of manuscript papers of Francis Glisson (Cambridge 1996). He has written essays on Renaissance philosophy and medicine. He is currently working on Francis Bacon’s philosophy (ERC Starting Grant ‘Francis Bacon and the Medicine of the Mind’).
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