The Incoherence of the Incoherence

The Incoherence of the Incoherence written by Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd, translated by Simon van den Bergh

PD (?) 1954. A rebuttal to al-Ghazali's The Incoherence of the Philosophers which had argued that Aristotle's teachings were self-contradictory, this is Averroës' best-known work, defending Aristotle.

• Preface
• Introduction

• 1. Eternity of the World
• 2. The Refutation of their Theory of the Incorruptibility of the World and of Time and Motion
• 3. The demonstration of their confusion in saying that God is the agent and the maker of the world and that the world in His product and act, and the demonstration that these expressions are in their system only metaphors without any real sense
• 4. Showing that they are unable to prove the existence of a creator of the world
• 5. To show their incapacity to prove God’s unity and the impossibility of two necessary existents both without a cause
• 6. To refute their denial of attributes
• 7. To refute their claim that nothing can share with the First its genus and be differentiated from it through a specific difference, and that with respect to its intellect the division into genus and specific difference cannot be applied to it
• 8. To refute their theory that the existence of the First is simple, namely that it is pure existence and that its existence stands in relation to no quiddity and to no essence, but stands to necessary existence as do other beings to their quiddity
• 9. To refute their proof that the First is incorporeal
• 10. To prove their incapacity to demonstrate that the world has a creator and a cause, and that in fact they are forced to admit atheism
• 11. To show the incapacity of those philosophers who believe that the First knows other things besides its own self and that it knows the genera and the species in a universal way, to prove that this is so
• 12. About the impotence of the philosophers to prove that God knows Himself
• 13. To refute those who affirm that God is ignorant of the individual things which are divided in time into present, past, and future
• 14. To refute their proof that heaven is an animal moving in a circle in obedience to God
• 15. To refute the theory of the philosophers about the aim which moves heaven
• 16. To refute the philosophical theory that the souls of the heavens observe all the particular events of this world

• About the Natural Sciences
  • The First Discussion
  • The Second Discussion
  • The Third Discussion
  • The Fourth Discussion