Renaissance Averroism and Its Aftermath: Arabic Philosophy in Early Modern Europe ed. by Anna Akasoy and Guido Giglioni (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Renaissance Averroism and Its Aftermath: Arabic Philosophy in Early Modern Europe ed. by Anna Akasoy and Guido Giglioni Steven Harvey Anna Akasoy and Guido Giglioni, editors. Renaissance Averroism and Its Aftermath: Arabic Philosophy in Early Modern Europe. International Archives of the History of Ideas, 211. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013. Pp. viii + 405. Cloth, $179.00. This rich volume of fifteen papers comprises the proceedings of a conference held at the Warburg Institute in 2008, with three additional papers. It begins with a learned introduction by one of the two editors, Guido Giglioni, that maps out the volume, outlines its main themes, and points to the care the editors have taken “in this volume” to distinguish Ibn Rushd, the twelfth-century historical figure, from Averroes, his literary incarnation in the Latin West, and to distinguish “between ‘Averroan’ [‘any philosophical view that belongs directly to Ibn Rushd’], ‘Averroist’ [any opinion held by a follower of Ibn Rushd in the medieval Latin West] and ‘Averroistic’ [‘the general cultural label denoting a pronounced [End Page 612] (vaguely Aristotelian) rationalistic attitude’]” (1–2). While scholars have long recognized the need to distinguish between Ibn Rushd’s teachings and those attributed to him by later thinkers, the pedantic distinction between Ibn Rushd’s teachings and those of Averroes seems misplaced and even misleading (and is not followed consistently in this book). Scholars of Ibn Rushd today who read him in the Arabic original do not always agree on his personal views (see, on this point, Anna Akasoy’s essay), particularly regarding philosophical problems such as God’s knowledge of particulars and the creation/eternity of the world. On the other hand, those who seek to understand Ibn Rushd through reading the medieval Latin translations are often able to do so. The key questions here concerning the medieval Latin readers are not semantic, but rather simply, did X read Averroes? Does he cite him approvingly? Does he seem to understand him? To what purpose does he use him? All too often in this volume, we are left to wonder in what ways Averroes parts from Ibn Rushd (and an Averroist teaching from an Averroan one), for example, Averroes’s view of supreme happiness (although curiously there is no reference in this volume to his commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics). The opening paper, one of my favorites, is Amos Bertolacci’s account of the critique of Averroes (=Ibn Rushd) against Avicenna on human spontaneous generation. For Bertolacci, who elsewhere has surveyed such criticisms by Ibn Rushd, Avicenna, “albeit negatively … is one of the most important sources of Averroes’s system”(39). Here he deftly traces Ibn Rushd’s various critiques in different places of Avicenna’s position on this topic—most interestingly, that it violates the principle of the necessary inherence of complex forms, like that of man, in specific matters; argues they are “representative of Averroes’s overall anti-Avicennian position” (41); and shows they do not present Avicenna’s views accurately. It may be noted that the highlighted inconsistencies here between Averroes’s Tahāfut and his long commentaries may be attributed to their different intentions and his considering only the latter demonstrative books. Charles Burnett’s short but sweet paper on the mid-sixteenth-century Latin editions of Aristotle’s corpus with Averroes’s commentaries spells out what is little known about the editors of these editions and their editorial policies and interests. Notwithstanding, his conclusion that the changes from edition to edition reflect “the developments in the academic circles in Padua and can hint at not only the academic discussions going on there, but also at the tensions, loyalties, and passions of the personalities involved” (64)seems a bit grandiose for the paper. Craig Martin’s suggestive chapter on the Latin commentaries on Averroes and, in particular, the sixteenth-century Latin supercommentaries on his Aristotelian commentaries, points to reasons for Averroes’s growing popularity during that century. The Latins turned to Averroes not only for his remarkably reliable philosophical expositions, but also because of his agreement with the Greek commentators, and his being a reliable source for their teachings (Dag Hasse would add for his philosophically attractive unicity of the intellect thesis...