Decisive Treatise & Epistle Dedicatory

Description

Description from the publisher: About This Volume Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126-1198 C.E.) emerged from an eminent family of scholars and jurists in Muslim Spain. He distinguished himself as an authority on medicine and jurisprudence, but he is most widely known today as the first and last great Aristotelian in the classical Islamic world. His meticulous commentaries on Aristotle influenced Latin Christian thinkers and earned him favorable mention (and a relatively pleasant fate) in Dante's Divina Commedia. The Decisive Treatise can be viewed as a plea before a tribunal in which the divinely revealed Law of Islam is the sole acknowledged authority. Averroes argues that the Law not only permits but mandates the study of philosophy and syllogistic or logical reasoning. In the course of his argument, he acquits certain earlier Muslim philosophers—particularly Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and al-Farabi—of the charge of unbelief. He dismisses al-Ghazali's criticisms of them as inconsistent and, indeed, as more harmful to the Islamic community than the philosophers' own views had been. For, says Averroes, al-Ghazali discussed difficult matters before audiences unequipped to understand them. By contrast, Averroes contends that the Law is designed to appeal to human beings in different ways, according to their varied capacities. He outlines its three fundamental methods as demonstrative reasoning, dialectical arguments, and rhetorical statements. Further, he asserts that those unqualified to properly evaluate a particular mode of reasoning should be barred from it, lest it harm them and the community. Averroes's Decisive Treatise and its explanatory Epistle Dedicatory form a clear and even impassioned defense of the legitimacy and proper role of reason in a community of faith. Biography of Translator CHARLES E. BUTTERWORTH, professor of government and politics at the University or Maryland, College Park, specializes in medieval Islamic political philosophy. After receiving political phi