Averroes' Impact On Thomas Aquinas And The Creation Of Modern Philosophy

 

Averroes

Rafael's "The School of Athens"

"Thomas Aquinas and Islam"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/05/thomas-aquinas-and-islam.html

St. Thomas Aquinas, Natural Law, and the Common Good 

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/01/st-thomas-aquinas-natural-law-and.html

On Saturday, July 4, 2015, <alanarchibaldo@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Fred,

While in Andalucia, I visited the home town of 12th century Islamic polymath (and Aristotelian) Averroes, whose impact on (fellow Andalusian) Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas is only now coming into full view.

Averroes' role in the intellectual history of Islam parallels (and presages) Aquinas' break from Augustine's Platonism (and neo-Platonism) --- an ongoing seismic shift in humankind's collective consciousness, a groundswell whose importance cannot be over-estimated.

I will write more on this.

For now, I encourage you to probe the following Wikipedia entry and my earlier post concerning Aquinas and Islam, the one that specifically refers to Freely's book about Islam's impact on Aquinas, resulting in his core postulation that Reason, by Nature, coincide with all manifestations of "The Divine Milieu"... and vice versa.

Arguing against those who said that natural philosophy was contrary to the Christian faith, (Aquinas) writes in his treatise "Faith, Reason and Theology that "even though the natural light of the human mind is inadequate to make known what is revealed by faith, nevertheless what is divinely taught to us by faith cannot be contrary to what we are endowed with by nature. One or the other would have to be false, and since we have both of them from God, he would be the cause of our error, which is impossible." 

"Aladdin's Lamp: How Greek Science Came to Europe Through the Islamic World" 

John Freely

In essence, the ground of being cannot be inconsistent with the findings of reason.

Notably, Aquinas touches upon this core dictum in his text "Tantum Ergo" which I'm sure you sang thousands of times in your youth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantum_Ergo

Two Important Data:
1.) Maimonides observed: "We must heed the truth from whatever quarter it comes."
2.) Averroes is known as "The Islamic Scholar Who Gave Us Modern Philosophy."


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averroes

Fred Owens	10:37 AM (22 minutes ago)
to me

I know more about Maimonides, mainly because my Hebrew teacher wrote a book about him. But I am glad that I can read the Arabic. I was able to decipher the inscriptions on the tiles in the Alhambra when I was there last October.