ABSTRACT
In the narrow sense, “Averroism” 1 in the Latin world refers to all the readings that were favorable, from the rational point of view, to the doctrine of the intellect put forward by the Andalusian philosopher Averroes or Ibn Rushd (1126–1198) in his Long Commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle, which made its appearance in Paris the middle of the 1220s. Averroes’s commentaries on Aristotle were so famous in the Late Middle Ages that he was commonly referred to as “the Commentator.” Now, Averroes’s theory of the intellect – or “noetics” for short – was forcefully rejected starting from the second half of the 13th century, both by the Catholic Church, which condemned it on two occasions in 1270 and 1277, 2 and by leading Christian theologians, such as Albertus Magnus (before 1200–1280), Bonaventure (1221–1274), and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the latter of whom judged it to be not only blasphemous, but conceptually absurd.
