AVEMPACE (Abū Bakr ibn ay-Šā'ig, from the nickname ibn Bāǧǧah or Bāǧah, which the Latins rendered as Avempace). — Philosopher, mathematician, physician, and student of music, born in Saragossa toward 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 Arabs of the East, who were inclined toward mystical reflection. Among the many works he wrote, in accordance with the custom of the time, in every branch of knowledge, those of philosophical interest include a treatise-commentary on the De Anima, the Epistula expeditionis (or continuationis, according to the scholastics), which in the original text is more properly entitled Letter of Farewell, and an extensive work, The Treatise of the Solitary.
In addition to these essays, which have reached us in fragmentary form and were studied by S. Munk, a Treatise on the Union of the Intellect with Man was recently identified by M. Asin Palacios and has now been published in the original Arabic: since all three of the works mentioned above are cited in it, the treatise must be regarded as later than them and therefore as A.’s final word on the subject. Man attains happiness, and indeed acquires the dignity of a rational person, through union first with the pure intelligibles and then with the one active intellect (separate). There are three kinds of forms: material sensible forms, immaterial intermediate forms (of the imagination), and pure immaterial forms; these are the effect of the intellect in act, which is at once the intelligible in act and man’s prime mover (§ 5). Union with the one intellect in act is a gift of God and the reward of virtue in the present and future life (§ 7). The common people usually remain at the first degree of imaginative forms, as do those who devote themselves to the practical arts; some rise to the sphere of intelligibles, in the pure sciences; few attain union with the intellect in act, which confers perfect, imperishable happiness. At this level, the object and the subject
of intellection are one and the same thing, and therefore the intellect is numerically one and multiple (§§ 13-14). The active intellect is like the sun, which illumines everything (§ 16), and it becomes present to all according to the variety of their dispositions. The multiplicity of individuals who attain the supreme degree concerns only that of their organs and instruments: all human beings of the past and the future become a single 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 which, at least in the case of the greatest intellects, separates them in time.