Concept

Avempace

Overview

Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Yaḥya ibn aṣ-Ṣā’igh at-Tūjībī ibn Bājja (Arabic: أبو بكر محمد بن يحيى بن الصائغ التجيبي بن باجة), known simply as Ibn Bajja (Arabic: ابن باجة) or his Latinized name Avempace (; c. 1085 – 1138), was an Arab polymath, whose writings include works regarding astronomy, physics, and music, as well as philosophy, medicine, botany, and poetry.

He was the author of the Kitāb an-Nabāt ("The Book of Plants"), a popular work on botany, which defined the sex of plants. His philosophical theories influenced the work of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Albertus Magnus. Most of his writings and books were not completed (or well-organized) due to his early death. He had a vast knowledge of medicine, mathematics, and astronomy. His main contribution to Islamic philosophy was his idea on soul phenomenology, which was never completed.

Avempace was, in his time, not only a prominent figure of philosophy but also of music and poetry. His diwan (Arabic: collection of poetry) was rediscovered in 1951. Though many of his works have not survived, his theories in astronomy and physics were preserved by Moses Maimonides and Averroes respectively, and influenced later astronomers and physicists in the Islamic civilization and Renaissance Europe, including Galileo Galilei.

Avempace wrote one of the first (argued by some to be the first) commentaries on Aristotle in the Western world. While his work on projectile motion was never translated from Arabic to Latin, his views became well known around the Western world and to Western philosophers, astronomers, and scientists of many disciplines. His works impacted contemporary medieval thought, and later influenced Galileo and his work. Avempace's theories on projectile motion are found in the text known as "Text 71".

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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Augustine appears to be of the same opinion when he expresses his belief that all corporeal things are ruled by God through the spirit of life (De Trin. iii, 4). From what has been said, then, it is clear that the heavenly bodies are not living beings in the same sense as plants and animals, and that if they are called so, it can only be equivocally. It will also be seen that the difference of opinion between those…
Aquinas Thomas, Summa Theologica, Part I
States what Avempace is; the author is tied to Avempace in the knowledge graph.
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He occasionally confused numbers with ideas, and atoms with numbers; his a priori notions were out of all proportion to his experience. He was ready to explain the phenomena of the heavens by the most trivial analogies of earth. The experiments which nature worked for him he sometimes accepted, but he never tried experiments for himself which would either prove or disprove his theories. His knowledge was unequal…
Plato, Timaeus
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The genius exhibited in the development of the mathematical technique places the names of Apollonius of Perga, Hipparchus of Nicaea, and Ptolemy among the great mathematicians of the world, but they never felt themselves free to attack by their hypotheses the fundamental assumptions of the ancient metaphysical doctrine of the universe.
John Dewey, Creative Intelligence
Close in meaning to Avempace; the term itself is not named.
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Philosophers who discussed Avempace

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Ibn Khaldun

Place in the tradition

Part of Judeo-Islamic philosophies (800–1400).

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