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Darrera modificació: 2024-03-13
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Mallet, Dominique, "Ibn Ṭufayl, Abū Bakr (Abubacer)", dins: Lagerlund, Henrik (ed.), Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy: Philosophy between 500 and 1500, Heidelberg, Springer, 2010, pp. 531-533.
- Resum
- Abū Bakr ibn Ṭufayl al-Qaysī (c. 504/1109–581/1185) was born in Guadix, near Grenada, and died in Marrakesh. He was a physician and belonged to the inner circle of the Almohad prince Abū Y‘aqūb Yūsuf (r. 1163–1184). The only complete work still extant by him is a qiṣṣa, i.e., a tale, entitled Risāla Ḥayy b. Yaqẓān.
The tale is introduced by few allusive pages in which the author places his work within the philosophical and literary traditions of Sufism and Arab philosophy.
The story itself is divided into two main parts. In the first one, the author describes how an infant named “Alive, Son of Awake”, grows up in a desert island and progresses solitarly into the knowledge, without any help of revelation, starting from the comprehension of the simplest things until he reaches the degree of the absorption into the pure intuition of real being, passing through the discovery of practical arts, physics, astronomy, and theology. The second part is devoted to the encounter between Ḥayy and a wise man, named Asāl, who arrives in the island seeking the inner truth of the Qurʾān. Asāl understands that Ḥayy has discovered what he was himself hoping to learn. Both men decide to emigrate to Asāl's country and to teach its inhabitants the secrets of the true wisdom, but they fail and return to the desert island to spend the rest of their lives in mystical happiness.
What does Ibn Ṭufayl's aim to teach exactly by narrating such a tale? The question is controversial. From the point of view of this article's author, Ibn Ṭufayl's does not want to show that the only possible choice for the wise is solitude, but, on the contrary, that the accomplishment of philosophy is necessarily political. Indeed, Ibn Ṭufayl's treatise could provide e contrario evidence of al-Fārābī's theses in political philosophy: Ibn Ṭufayl's plot and its outcome could be read as an illustration of the analysis included in the second part of al-Fārābī's Book of Letters.
- Matèries
- Filosofia
Història de la medicina
Biografia
- URL
- https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.100 ...
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