Averroes

Born in Córdoba in 1126, Ibn Rushd trained in law and medicine but spent his life trying to recover what he saw as the true Aristotle, stripped of Neoplatonist distortion. He argued that philosophy wasn't just permitted in Islam but required of certain minds, and that scripture should bend to reason when the two conflicted. His medical work described Parkinson's symptoms for the first time and proposed new theories of stroke; his legal treatise parsed the roots of disagreement between Islamic schools. But his commentaries on Aristotle—translated into Latin and Hebrew—became his collision with…