Arabic Thought and Its Place in HistoryO'Leary, De Lacy
ReligionIslamic
Arabic Thought and Its Place in History
O'Leary, De Lacy
Philosophy, Arab
Therefore immaterial substances can be understood by us.” (S.
Thos. Aquin. _Summa._ 1, 88.)
As the Agent Intellect enters into communication with relative being
it has to suffer the conditions of relativity, and so is not equally
efficient in all; it acts on sensible images as form acts on matter,
yet the Agent Intellect never becomes corruptible as that on which it
acts.
These are in outline the points in the teaching of Ibn Rushd, which
show the most marked differences from that of his predecessors,
and which afterwards provoked most controversy amongst the Latin
scholastics.
Ibn Rushd really ends the illustrious line of Arabic Aristotelians.
A few Aristotelian scholars followed in Spain, but with the decay of
the Muwahhid power these came to an end. Of those later scholars we
may mention Muhyi ad-Din b. `Arabi (d. 638) and `Abdu l-Haqq b. Sab`in
(d. 667). The former of these was primarily a Sufi, and shows a strong
inclination towards pantheism. `Abdu l-Haqq, the last of the Muwahhid
circle, was also a Sufi, but at the same time an accurate student of
Aristotle. In modern Islam there is no Aristotelian scholarship, save
only in logic, where Aristotle has always held his own.
CHAPTER X
THE JEWISH TRANSMITTORS
We have already seen that the Jews took a prominent part in bringing
a knowledge of philosophical research from Asia to Spain, and Ibn
Jabirul (Avencebrol) takes his place in the line of transmission by
which Spanish Islam was brought into contact with these studies. This
did not end the participation of the Jews in philosophical work, but
their subsequent writers do not form part of the regular series of
Aristotelian students influencing the Muslim world, but are rather
confined to Jewish circles. Yet they are of an importance wider than
merely sectarian interests, for it was by means of Jewish disciples of
Ibn Rushd that he was raised to a position of much greater importance
than he has ever enjoyed in the Muslim world. Amongst the Jews, indeed,
there arose a strong Averroist school, which later on was the chief
means of introducing Ibn Rushd’s theories to Latin scholasticism. As
we shall see later the transmission of philosophy from Arabic to Latin
surroundings falls into two stages: in the earlier the Arabic material
passes directly, and the works used are those which had attained a
leading importance in Islam, but in the later stage the Jews were the
intermediaries, and thus the choice of text-books and authorities was
largely influenced by an existing Jewish scholasticism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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