Talkhīṣāt al-ṭabīʿiyyāt

When the philosopher and court physician Ibn Ṭufayl brought Averroes before the Almohad caliph Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf in 1169, the caliph asked him whether the heavens had existed from eternity or had a beginning. When the caliph later complained that Aristotle was hard to follow, Ibn Ṭufayl proposed that Averroes explain him. The four texts gathered on this page come from the first years of that work, and they are commentaries on Aristotle, not treatises of Averroes's own: middle commentaries (talkhīṣ, a close paraphrase) on On the Heavens and On Generation and Corruption, and two epitomes, shorter digests in his own order, of the books on the soul and of the short treatises on sense, memory, sleep, dreams and the length of life that Latin readers called the Parva naturalia. The story of that first audience comes from al-Marrakushī, a historian who finished his chronicle in 1224. On the Heavens answers the caliph's question as Aristotle did: the heavens neither came into being nor will perish. The commentary on generation dates to 1172; the epitome of the Parva naturalia names Seville and 1170 at its close, where Averroes says he has treated the causes of long and short life as far as his understanding reached, given the little time his other work left him. He was a judge in Seville then. The epitome on the soul opens by promising to take from the earlier commentators whatever agrees best with natural science and with Aristotle's purpose, and its account of the intellect — the power by which a person understands — is the first of several he wrote. In his last years he concluded that the intellect which receives knowledge is one and the same for all human beings. That doctrine, read in Latin, became the mark of what its critics called Averroism, and in 1270 the bishop of Paris condemned it among other teachings of the arts masters there.