- Length
- 480 pagesVan Den Bergh, Averroes' Tahafut al-Tahafut, 2 vols, 1954
- Reading
- HardPresupposes texts it does not explain; a guide helps
- Availability
- Specialist pressIn print from an academic publisher, priced accordingly
The Incoherence of the Incoherence
A book whose whole existence is a reply, answering an eighty-five-year-old attack passage by passage with the attack reprinted alongside. It failed where it was aimed and succeeded where it was not: Islamic philosophy went another way, while Latin Europe made its author the Commentator and spent three centuries arguing about him.
- Date
- c. 1180
- Author
- Ibn Rushd
- Region
- Cordoba and Marrakesh
- Language
- Arabic
- 1328 Hebrew, Kalonymus ben Kalonymus The route by which Latin Europe received it Consensus
- 1954 English, Simon Van Den Bergh Two volumes with commentary; the standard, in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Commentary
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 85 years
Almost without influence in the Islamic world it was written for, and one of the most consequential books in Latin Europe and in Jewish philosophy for the next three centuries.
What the book says
A rebuttal built by quotation. Ibn Rushd takes al-Ghazali's attack on the philosophers, reproduces it in passage-sized pieces, and answers each one where it stands, so that the reader has the charge and the defence on the same page. Across the twenty disputes his strategy is consistent. Sometimes he argues that al-Ghazali has attacked Ibn Sina's version of a doctrine rather than Aristotle's, and that the version being demolished was a departure from the philosophy it claimed to represent - the emanation scheme in particular he regards as an Avicennan invention with no warrant. Sometimes he argues that the objection misunderstands what a demonstration claims. The longest exchange is over causation. Against the argument that we observe fire and burning in sequence and never observe necessity between them, Ibn Rushd replies that to deny necessary connection is to deny that things have natures, and that a world in which anything might follow anything is a world in which nothing could be known or named - including by the person making the argument. On the three charges of unbelief he is unyielding, and he closes by arguing that these questions should not be put before the public at all.
What it argues
That the philosophers had not claimed what al-Ghazali refuted, and that the refutation, pressed to its conclusion, destroys the possibility of knowledge. On causation the reply is the sharpest: if the connection between fire and burning is nothing but habitual sequence, then things have no natures; if things have no natures, they cannot be defined; and if they cannot be defined, nothing can be known or even named. Ibn Rushd's second line of defence is historical - that much of what was attacked was Ibn Sina's, not Aristotle's, and that a purer Aristotelianism is not vulnerable to it. Behind both stands his conviction that demonstration and revelation cannot conflict, since truth does not contradict truth, and that where they appear to, the scriptural text is to be read figuratively by those qualified to do so.
What it answered
al-Ghazali's Incoherence, and through it the whole theological case that philosophy overreaches. The choice of form is itself the argument: by quoting his opponent at length rather than summarising, Ibn Rushd stakes everything on the reader seeing both sides, which is a claim about how disputes should be conducted as much as about who is right.
How it argues
By reprinting the enemy. The structure - quotation, then reply, twenty times over - is unusual anywhere in philosophy and unique at this length, and it has an odd consequence: the book preserves its opponent. Editors of al-Ghazali use it as a witness to his text, and a reader who wants the attack in full can get it here. The tone is exasperated rather than measured, and Ibn Rushd is at least as hard on Ibn Sina, whom he is nominally defending, as on al-Ghazali.
The moment
Almohad Spain and Morocco, where Ibn Rushd served as a judge in Seville and Cordoba and as physician to the caliph, and where he had been commissioned to write commentaries making Aristotle intelligible. In 1195, in the middle of a political crisis, he fell from favour: his works were condemned and burned and he was banished to a town outside Cordoba. He was restored shortly before his death in 1198, and the philosophical tradition he defended did not continue after him in the Islamic west.
How it travelled
Sideways, into two traditions that were not the intended one. In the Islamic world the book had little effect; the Ash'arite settlement held, and later Islamic philosophy developed along Avicennan and illuminationist lines. But Ibn Rushd's commentaries on Aristotle were translated into Latin and Hebrew, and in Europe he became simply the Commentator - the standard guide to Aristotle for the universities, praised by Aquinas, attacked as the source of doctrines the Church condemned in 1270 and 1277, and the origin of a movement called Averroism that its namesake would not have recognised. Jewish philosophers read him in Hebrew for three centuries.
The strongest objection
That it does not answer al-Ghazali's actual point. al-Ghazali did not claim that fire fails to burn; he claimed that the necessity we take ourselves to observe is not observed, and that the philosophers had called a regularity a demonstration. Ibn Rushd's reply - that abandoning necessary connection makes knowledge impossible - is an argument from consequences, and an unwelcome consequence is not a refutation. Hume made the same observational point six centuries later without the theological framing and it has not been disposed of since. The exchange is therefore live rather than concluded, which is unusual for a twelfth-century dispute.
Why read it
With al-Ghazali, and not otherwise - the pair is the point. The first discussion, on the world's eternity, and the seventeenth, on causation, are the two to read, and reading them in this format, with the attack and the answer alternating, is the best demonstration available anywhere of what a philosophical reply looks like when someone takes the trouble to reproduce what they are answering.
- First printed
- 1497
- First in English
- 1954
- Digitised
- Partial
Because it quotes its target so fully, the book is also a witness to the text of al-Ghazali's Tahafut, and editors of the earlier work use it.
Van Den Bergh's 1954 English with its enormous commentary is the standard and is in copyright. The medieval Latin, made from Hebrew, is public domain and unusable.
Where it stands
Live, and increasingly so. The causation exchange is discussed alongside Hume, the argument about the relation between demonstration and revelation is a standing reference point in debates about reason and faith, and Ibn Rushd has become a symbol in contemporary argument about the Islamic philosophical inheritance - a use that outruns anything in the text.
On quoting this book
The Arabic is public domain; the only usable English version is in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How far Ibn Rushd's own position differs from Aristotle's is argued, particularly on the unity of the intellect, which is the doctrine that got Averroism condemned and which he may not have held in the form attributed to him. Whether the closing argument for restricting these debates to the qualified is an elitist evasion or a considered position about the social effects of philosophy is disputed. And the modern use of him as the emblem of a rationalist Islamic tradition suppressed by orthodoxy is a considerable simplification of a career spent as a judge applying religious law.