El filósofo como heredero de los profetas: el racionalismo islámico de Averroes

Abstract

This essay argues that, underlying the legal framework of Averroes’s Faṣl al-maqāl , there appears to be a genuine desire to reconcile the claims of reason with the demands of faith; then, that Averroes based this reconciliation on the acceptance of a hermeneutical theory that sees the divine Word as addressing all human beings according to their intellectual capacities and that, consequently, he did not exclude the learned from the religious duty of assenting to revealed truth. Finally, and contrary to overstated secularist interpretations of his rationalism, it is suggested that there are grounds to defend the view that Averroes conceived of philosophy in quasi-religious terms, as the noblest work to be carried out in the presence of God, making its practitioners the rightful ‘heirs of the prophets’.