Jean-Baptiste Brenet – författare

This book is an essay - with an annotated translation - about the psychology of Averroes, Aristotle’s Commentator, and its influence in Latin philosophy. It specifically addresses his famous doctrine of the intellect, long deemed scandalous, and its critical defence by one of his epigones, the English XIVth century theologian Thomas Wylton, also descended from the great scholastics Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. On new textual bases, the author tackles some of the main noetic questions of Greco-Arabic peripateticism: the relation between soul and body, the status of imagination, the nature of the intellect’s power, the autonomy of the thinker, or the theoretical accomplishment of the individual as conjunction with the “agent” intellect. The author argues that Wylton’s averroism is a conceptually consistent exegesis, an indiosynchratic combination of various elements found in Ibn Rushd’s system, while also, against a depreciatory tradition, contextualizing Averroes and his doctrine in relation to the active field of modern philosophy, within an identical rationality.

El nombre Averroes es aquel de un escándalo. He aquí el hombre tras la tesis descabellada acerca del intelecto separado de los individuos y único para toda la especie. ¿Consecuencia? La negación de la proposición "yo pienso": la ruina de la racionalidad. Esto, durante quinientos años, fastidió a Europa. ¿Cómo comprender esta historia que reúne fascinación y rechazo? ¿De dónde viene que el averroísmo, refutado en bloque, no cese de reaparecer? Con Freud, Jean-Baptiste Brenet propone una respuesta: Abu l-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad Ibn Rušd, alias Averroes, es el arquetipo de una "inquietante extrañeza" que viene a asediar y descentrar la hegemonía del pensamiento que ancla la configuración de la racionalidad latina; compulsión ominosa, también, del pensar actual.