Ibn Rushd’s Interpretation of Aristotelian Rationality and Its Relation with Religion

Ibn Rushd or Averroes was a great philosopher in the western part of the Islamic world. He believed that Aristotle was a prime case of the human species in rationality. He defined his project as interpretation of Aristotle for the Islamic world. In his view, many problems were caused for Muslim intellectuals because of their failure to have an accurate understanding of Aristotle. He accounts for various dimensions of the autonomous Aristotelian rationality, highlighting the characteristic distinction between rational or epistemic certainty and persuasion as a result of religious doctrines. In his view, certainty is a product of the evolutionary process of human perception of the sensible and the universal rational nature of creatures, insisting on its autonomy and uniqueness on the path to the truth. In Ibn Rushd’s view, religion has a pragmatic character and it by no means claims to be veridical or truth-oriented. Instead, it just aims moral virtues—to put ordinary people on the way of attaining happiness. In this article, I adopt an explanatory-analytic method to articulate Ibn Rushd’s interpretation of the nature of the autonomous Aristotelian rationality and formulate its relation to religion. This is a path that might contribute to our understanding of the foundations and roots of our current problems with regard to the relation between reason and religion as well as traditional and modern thoughts.