Abstract

© Al-Masaq, 9 (1996-1997): 179-189 GHAZÄLĪ AND AVERROES ON MEANING Oliver Leaman Liverpool John Moores University One tends to regard Ghazātī (d. 505/1111) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd, d. 595/1198-9) as irretrievably opposed to each other on a wide range of topics, and especially on issues of philosophical methodology. After all, Averroes devotes a long book to a point by point refutation of Ghazātī's Tahāfut al-Falāsifa, and in many of his other works he takes subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, digs at the ideas of his predecessor. Chazan, the great enemy of falsafa, argued that many of the basic principles of the sort of philosophy produced by Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 428/1036-7) were both opposed to Islam and also fallacious by the standards of that philosophy itself. Averroes had a difficult task to perform, since he also objected to a great many of the arguments and conclusions produced by Avicenna, yet he objected even more strongly to the ways in which Ghazätl sought to refute that whole way of doing theoretical investigation.1 Averroes was confident enough about philosophy to think that it embodied the answer to most of the important questions about reality, and religion was just another way