Aristotle and Averroes: The Influences of Aristotle's Arabic Commentator upon Western European and Arabic Rhetoric

Abstract

During the 9th through 12th centuries, Aristotle's works, including the Rhetoric, were translated and studied in Arabic centers of learning, following the Prophet Mohammad's injunction to “seek knowledge even unto China.” Averroes (Ibn Rushd, d. 1198), the most prominent of the scholars who wrote commentaries on Aristotle's works, advocated that pagan Greek philosophical logic and rhetoric complimented, rather than contradicted, Islamic teaching. However, Averroes's strictly rationalist views and appreciation for pagan Greek philosophy clashed with an intensification of Islamic orthodoxy toward the end of the 12th century, and the commentator's reputation declined or disappearerd in Islamic centers of learning. Many of Averroes's works, though, were translated into Latin, Hebrew, and other languages, and his texts were studied along with Aristotle's in medieval Europe. This essay attempts to sbhow that, in a minor way, Averroes's heritage as an Aristotelian commentator continues to be studied and, thus, to influence rhetoric in both Western and Arabic countries. It also demonstrates, however, that these desultory efforts do not take advantage of the potential for insightful scholarship on this subject. In the long history of the dominant intellectual tradition of the Muslim world, Averroes offered for a brief few years the revolutionary perspective that logic, and consequently, rhetoric was independent of ideology or religion. The ramifications of that perspective have yet to be fully explored.