AVEMPACE (Abū Bakr ibn aṣ-Ṣā'īg, surnamed ibn Bā'gāḥ or Bā'gāḥ, which the Latins rendered as Avempace). — Philosopher, mathematician, physician, and student of music, born in Saragossa at the end of the 11th century, died in Fez in 1139. He appears to have been the first in the Arab West to attempt a purely speculative philosophy, unlike the Eastern Arabs who were inclined toward mystical reflection. Among the many works he wrote, following the custom of the time, on every branch of knowledge, those of philosophical interest include a treatise-commentary on the De Anima, the Epistula expeditionis (or continuatio nis, according to the Scholastics), which in the original text reads rather as Letter of Farewell, and a lengthy work, The Treatise of the Solitary.
In addition to these essays, which have reached us in fragments and have been studied by S. Munk, a Treatise on the Union of the Intellect with Man has recently been identified by M. Asín Palacios and now published in the original Arabic: since all three of the aforementioned works are cited within it, the treatise must be considered subsequent to them and thus as Avempace’s final word on the subject. Man attains happiness and indeed is constituted in the dignity of a rational person through union first with pure intelligibles and then with the single active intellect (which is separate). There are three kinds of forms: material sensibles, intermediate immaterial forms (of the imagination), and purely immaterial forms; these are the effect of the intellect in act, which is at once the intelligible in act and the first mover of man (§ 5). Union with the single active intellect is a gift of God and the reward of virtue in this life and the next (§ 7). The common people usually stop at the first degree of imaginative forms, as do those who devote themselves to practical arts; some ascend to the sphere of intelligibles, in the pure sciences; few arrive at union with the active intellect, which confers perfect happiness unattainable elsewhere. At this level, the object and subject of intellection are one and the same, and thus the intellect is numerically one and many (§ 13–14). The active intellect is like the sun that illuminates all things (§ 16) and makes itself present to all according to the variety of their dispositions. The multiplicity of individuals who have reached the highest degree pertains only to that of their organs and instruments: all men of the past and future become one man, and the only difference remaining among them is that arising from the greater or lesser degree of this union (§ 20), as well as from the distance—at least for the greatest minds—that separates them in time.