Where the Middle Ages Begin
At the outset of his influential study on Rabelais, Mikhail Bakhtin makes an interesting observation. The scholar dedicates several pages to detail how the French author’s critical reception changed over time. Bakhtin illustrates how the attempt to comprehend an author can frequently be stymied by the cultural changes that occur across the centuries.
Abū al-Walīd Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd—or Averroës, as he was known to Latin readers—was born in 1126 at the far western edge of the Islamic world, in Córdoba, Spain.
Ibn Rushd’s response to al-Ghazili ’s rather specious use of logic introduces the differentiation of religious and “scientific” or philosophical truths: an important, necessary, and previously unarticulated distinction which reverberated in the cathedrals and universities of Europe and which remains relevant for contemporary thinkers faced with similar dilemmas.
Despite the resurgence of interest in the medieval conception of memory among scholars working in a wide variety of disciplines within medieval studies, little attention has been paid in recent times to the conception of memory found in the psychological writings of medieval philosophers, especially those from the Arabic tradition.
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