Thinker · Aristotelians

Averroes

1126 – 1198 · Aristotelians · Faith meets reason

He spent his life on one wager: that the most rigorous reason and the revealed Law are two roads to a single truth, and that since truth cannot contradict truth, philosophy has every right to exist alongside religion rather than cowering before it. When a famous book tried to prove that the philosophers were not just wrong but unbelievers, he wrote the rebuttal. When scripture seemed to clash with what reason had demonstrated, he argued that scripture must be read allegorically, not that reason must be silenced. He defended Aristotle so exhaustively, line by line, that Latin Europe stopped using his name and just called him the Commentator.