AVEMPACE (Abū Bakr ibn ay-Šā'ig, from the nickname of ibn Bāǧǧah or Bāǧah, which the Latins rendered as Avempace). - Philosopher, mathematician, physician and cultivator of music, b. at Saragossa toward the end of the 11th century, d. at 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 to mystical reflection. Among the many works he wrote, according to the custom of the time, in every branch of knowledge, those of philosophical interest are a treatise-commentary on the De Anima, the Epistula expeditionis (or continuationis, according to the Scholastics), which in the original text reads rather as Letter of Farewells, and a vast work, The Treatise of the Solitary.
In addition to these essays, which have come down to us in fragmentary form and have been studied by S. Munk, a Treatise on the Union of the Intellect with Man has recently been identified by M. Asin Palacios and has now been published in the original Arabic: since all three of the above-mentioned works are cited in it, the treatise must be considered later than they are and therefore as A.'s last word on the subject. Man attains happiness, and indeed constitutes himself in the dignity of a rational person, in union first with the pure intelligibles and then with the one active (separate) intellect. There are three kinds of forms: material sensible, intermediate immaterial (of the imagination) and purely immaterial; 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 one intellect in act is a gift of God and a reward of the virtues in the present and the future life (§ 7). The common crowd usually stops at the first degree of the imaginative forms, and so do those who devote themselves to the practical arts; some rise to the sphere of the intelligibles, in the pure sciences; few arrive at union with the intellect in act, which gives perfect happiness that cannot be lost. In this degree the object and the subject of intellection are one and the same thing, and therefore the intellect is numerically one and many (§§ 13-14). The active intellect is like the sun that illuminates everything (§ 16) and makes itself present to all according to the variety of their dispositions. The multiplicity of individuals who have reached the supreme degree concerns only that of organs and instruments: all men of the past and of the future become a single man, and the only difference remaining among them is that which comes from the greater or lesser degree of this union (§ 20), and also from the distance, at least for the greatest intellects, that separates them in time.