Averroes

Ibn Rushd, Latinized as Averroes, lived from 14 April 1126 to 11 December 1198 and was an Andalusian polymath and jurist proficient in philosophy, theology, medicine, astronomy, physics, psychology, mathematics, neurology, Islamic jurisprudence, law and linguistics, the author of more than 100 books and treatises whose philosophical works include numerous commentaries on Aristotle that earned him the epithets The Commentator and Father of Rationalism in the Western world. He was a strong proponent of Aristotelianism who attempted to restore what he considered the original teachings of Aristotle, opposed the Neoplatonist tendencies of earlier Muslim thinkers such as al-Farabi and Avicenna, and defended the pursuit of philosophy against criticism by Ash'ari theologians such as Al-Ghazali, arguing that philosophy was permissible and even compulsory among certain elites in Islam and that scriptural text should be interpreted allegorically where it appeared to contradict reason. In medicine he proposed a new theory of stroke, described the signs and symptoms of Parkinson's disease for the first time, and may have been the first to identify the retina as the part of the eye responsible for sensing light; his medical book Al-Kulliyat fi al-Tibb, translated into Latin as the Colliget, became a European textbook for centuries. His legacy in the Islamic world was modest, but in the West his extensive commentaries on Aristotle, translated into Latin and Hebrew, reignited European interest in Aristotle and triggered a philosophical movement called Averroism, whose best known and most controversial doctrine was his unity of the intellect thesis proposing that all humans share the same intellect; his works were condemned by the Catholic Church in 1270 and 1277, and although weakened by sustained critique from Thomas Aquinas, Latin Averroism continued to attract followers into the sixteenth century.