A major Islamic thinker, poet and musician, scientist, and mathematician, Ibn Bajjah was a forerunner of Averroës. Known to the Latin Schoolmen as Avempace, or Avenpace, he was born in Saragossa, Spain, and known in his lifetime as the prime exponent of Aristotelian thought after Avicenna. He follows Al-Farabi and his work greatly influenced Ibn Tufail. Averroës himself states that his own ideas of mind are derived from Ibn Bajjah. His ʼIlm al-Nafs (Science of the Soul) is the earliest text hitherto known that gives the gist of all the three books of the De anima of Aristotle, and he is known, among other things, to Western scholars for his theory of separate substances, which they adopted from him. In his Guide to the Solitary he deals with the soul's return to reality by detaching itself from matter.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
- Bibliography
- Leff, G. (1958). Medieval Thought.
The Oxford Companion to the Mind. Second Edition. Copyright © Oxford University Press, 2004. All rights reserved.
