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Before launching into the discussions and debates at the heart of this volume, a number of disclaimers and caveats are in order. First of all, this is not primarily a book on Ibn Rushd, the renowned judge, physician and commentator of Aristotle who lived in twelfth-century al-Andalus, but on a cultural phenomenon known since the thirteenth century as Averroism. This is no terminological hair-splitting on our part: keeping this difference in mind while reading the book is crucial. That the commentator Ibn Rushd was also a thinker in his own right adds to the difficulties in disentangling the nature of the authorial intention in his work. Some initial terminological qualifications, we hope, will shed light on the linguistic and cultural complexities of the matter: in this volume, the name "Ibn Rushd" denotes the actual historical figure, whereas his literary incarnation in translations and philosophical treatises of the Latin West will be referred to as "Averroes". We have taken special care in distinguishing between "Averroan", "Averroist" and "Averroistic" every time we thought it necessary to alert the reader to the constantly intersecting levels of history and historiography.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-5240-5_1

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