152 - Richard Taylor on Averroes

Hi Peter,

Your podcast are really great to get introduced to great philosophical tradition especially for some one like me whose background is Medicine not philosophy and a 20 minutes a week is indeed nourishing to mind. I very much liked your Avicenna's flying experiment may be because I like Avicenna. My question now is on Averroes: how much of his work have survived in its original Arabic and how many are there in Latin and Hebrew. Has there been an attempt to retranslate his surviving Latin work into Arabic.

Alamin

If you mentioned it somewhere I've forgotten - what is that song that you've been playing on the Islamic philosophy podcasts?
Also - if you find yourself devoting a podcast to Ibn Gabirol, you might consider playing a little of Orphaned Land's metal cover of his liturgical poem, Shofet Kol Ha'aretz (Olat Hatamid):
Studio version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TbzEjWsONU
Live: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4z8v_UFPSA

Dear Peter,

Thank you! This interview, for me, was particularly helpful not only as a guide into Ibn Rushd's Decisive Treatise but also re Ibn Khaldun's Prolegomena. I know this blog page is about Ibn Rushd, and that there is a prior podcast for Khaldun, but listeners may be interested to know that Khaldun's text provides a good example of what Taylor was discussing re the importance of dreams, as outlined in Arabic Parva Naturalia.

In books 1 and 3 of the Prolegomena we see the standard scala naturae argument moving up through the vegetative, sensitive and rational souls and their respective objects of knowledge (with Khaldun providing a wonderful Neoplatonist othorgenetic evolutionary argument from apes to humans to angels in passing!). There are three forms of human knowledge and corresponding types of rational soul: scholarly discursive/dianoic, mystical/intuitive/noetic and finally prophetic/angelic/(manic ?)and the latter explains the origin of the Surahs.

I had looked high and low in the Oxford Parva Naturalia to source this reference without luck. Professor Taylor illustrates why - the Arabic version had a few bonus features! From a Peripatetic point of view it is indeed a "strange thing" as Taylor suggests. But from a Neoplatonist and/or Sufi point of view, one can see how this text supports a cosmic procession and return in a proto-orthogenetic way. A very pretty world picture aesthetically, which, I think, is analogous to some 19th C. "Idealist" evolutionary schemes.

Peter - if I what I have written above is roughly correct, have you covered similar cosmologies in prior episodes (I doubt Khaldun would be unique here). Further, if you could inform of any papers on the Arabic Parva Naturalia or related further reading (is it translated into English?), I would be very grateful.

Thanks again.
Craig

Hi Peter,

thanks first of all for the podcasts, they are both highly instructive and entertaining. I really enjoy them!

One question about Averroes (that you may have answered already somewhere ...): Would it be correct to say that Averroes considers God the causa finalis of the universe but not the causa efficiens?

Thanks again, Jürgen