- Lived:
- c. 1105 (Guadix, near Granada) – 1185 (Marrakesh)
- Tradition:
- Islamic philosophy in Almohad Spain and Morocco — physician, vizier, and author of the world's first philosophical novel
- The Big Idea:
- A human mind, raised utterly alone with no teacher, no language, and no scripture, could reason its way from suckling to the summit of metaphysics — and what it found there would match what the prophets taught, told in a different register.
- In their words:
- "It dawned on him that his mother, who had nursed him and cared for him so tenderly, was that something which had departed — and that her body was no more than its instrument."
- If you remember one thing:
- Five hundred years before the Enlightenment asked what unaided reason could achieve, an Andalusian court physician answered with a story: a baby, a gazelle, an empty island — and, at the end of the climb, everything.