Quotes About Averroes

One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.

All sciences originated among the sons of Israel, the reason being the existence of prophecy among them which made their perfection in the sciences amazing.

Averroes, the last of the great medieval Arab philosophers, was fighting a rearguard defense of philosophy that was under attack from theologians, and, though translations of his works were to be much read in the universities of Christian Europe, he had little influence on later generations of thinkers in the Muslim world.

it seems clear that Ibn Khaldun preferred al-Ghazali to Averroes. "He who wants to arm himself against the philosophers in the field of dogmatic beliefs should turn to the works of al-Ghazali.

Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called Rushdie, and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroës, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd.

Computers certainly possess the ability to reason and the capacity for self-reference. And just because they do, their actions are intrinsically inscrutable. Consequently, as they become more powerful and perform a more varied set of tasks, computers exhibit an unpredictability approaching that of human beings. Indeed, by Averroës's standards, they possess the same degree of immortality as humans.

For medieval thinkers, this was an eye-opening revelation. Side by side with divine truth, Averroës was saying, lay another truth, that of the natural world. This insight earned Averroës an admiration equaled by no other living non-Christian. It is why Dante praises him in his Divine Comedy and why Raphael gives him a prominent place in his School of Athens.

Averroës, or Ibn-Rushd, the chief jurist in Córdoba and also the court physician," said Joël. "He was the first medical man to describe the symptoms of what we call Parkinson's disease

An army of philosophers would not be sufficient to change the nature of error and to make it truth.

It is not growing fanaticism, but growing democracy, that causes my troubles. Did you ever read the life of Averroes? He was protected by kings, but hated by the mob, which was fanatical. In the end, the mob won. Free thought has always been a perquisite of aristocracy.