Averroes the Terrible

The outstanding representative of the golden age of Arab civilization, Abu-l-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), better known by his Latinized name Averroes, introduced to the West the late antique reception of Aristotle's ideas, acting as an author of commentaries on his works. A mediator between ancient and Christian philosophy, Averroes was at the same time a bugbear for the scholastics: his interpretation of Aristotle's concept of the separate intellect seemed too bold to Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and their followers. The French philosopher Jean-Baptiste Brenne (born 1972) tries to understand the reasons for the horror Averroes instilled in his Western readers. Averroes appears as one of the first critics of Christian metaphysics, undermining its foundations many centuries before it came under fire from Nietzscheanism and psychoanalysis. Relying on Freud, Brenne sees in Averroism a repressed progenitor of Western thought, a "hidden borderland," returning to it in a terrifying guise, or a mirror showing it its own inside.