AVEMPACE (IBN BĀJJAH, ABŪ BAKR MUHAMMAD IBN YAHYĀ)

Arab philosopher who flourished in Spain; b. Saragossa (date unknown) and went to Seville in 1118; d. at the Almoravid court at Fez, 1138. He wrote works on medicine and mathematics, and commented on Aristotle's Physica, Meteorologica, De generatione et corruptione, De generatione animalium, and De partibus animalium. His main philosophical writings include treatises on logic, the Regime or Guide of the Solitary, On the Contact of the Intellect with Man, a treatise on the soul, and a letter of farewell. The last three were cited by averroËs in his Commentarium magnum on Aristotle's De anima.

In the Regime of the Solitary, according to a synopsis given by a 14th-century Jewish writer, Moses of Narbonne, Avempace tries to show how man can achieve union with the Agent Intellect. By seeking not merely forms of material things but also universal spiritual forms or ideas, the human intellect can gradually work up to a level where it grasps ideas of ideas. Thus, by its own power, it can come to know separated substances. In other works, too, Avempace holds that through a progressive abstraction of quiddities man's intellect can reach a quiddity that has no further quiddities, i.e., the quiddity of a separated substance. Averroës reports these views and notes their author's abiding concern with the question of how man's intellect can achieve its end: union with the separated Agent Intellect. That question, says Averroës, never left the thought of Avempace, "not even for the space of time it takes to blink an eye" (Comm. de anim. 3.36, 487 Med. Acad. ed.). Aquinas restates Avempace's views and criticizes them as "frivolous" (C. gent. 3.41).

Avempace's commentary on the Physica seems to have been influential in the formulation of Galileo's law of falling bodies.

See Also: arabian philosophy; intellect, unity of; science (in the middle ages).

Bibliography: avempace, "Ibn Bājjah's Tadbīru’l-Mutawahhīd (Rule of the Solitary)," ed. and tr. d. m. dunlop, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1945) 61–81, partial text in Arabic and Eng. s. munk, Mélanges de philosophie juive et arabe (new ed. Paris 1955). m. clagget, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (Madison, Wis. 1959). e. a. moody, "Galileo and Avempace: The Dynamics of the Leaning Tower Experiment," Journal of the History of Ideas 12 (1951) 163–193, 375–422.

[b. h. zedler]