Averroes and Maimonides: translating religious motives into philosophy with Ali Benmakhlouf (UM6P)

Averroes and Maimonides lived at the same time in 12th-century Andalusia without ever meeting. In Cairo, Maimonides received Averroes' works late in life. He had already written The Guide for the Perplexed. In this lecture, visiting lecturer Ali Benmakhlouf will attempt to show that the common concern of these two philosophers was to translate religious motifs into philosophical arguments. They did not do so in the same way. Two major questions arise: What were the processes by which they carried out this translation? What were the challenges for them in making such a translation?

Ali Benmakhlouf is currently professor at Mohammed VI Polytechnique University (UM6P), director of the African Studies Centre (UM6P) and of the center for Arabic classical philosophy and philosophy of sciences, professor emeritus at Paris Est Val de Marne University and honorary member of the “Institut Universitaire de France”.
He is currently involved in debates on bioethics, having been a member and then vice-chairman of the French National Consultative Ethics Committee (CCNE, 2008-2016) and the Consultative Ethics Committee (CCDE) of the “Institut de recherches (IRD) pour le développement”, which he chaired from 2009 to 2013.
He is a member of the Société Française de Philosophie, the Institut International de Philosophie, and a permanent member of the “Académie Nationale de Pharmacie” (since 2020) and of the Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco (since 2022).

His research focuses on three areas:
1) Medical sciences. His latest book in this field is entitled “The power of reason, logic and medicine” (Fayard, 2018).
2) The philosophy of logic. He has written numerous books on G. Frege, B. Russell, A.N.
Whitehead, L. Wittgenstein.
3) The forgotten legacies of classical Arab philosophy (Al Fârâbi, Ibn Tufayl, Averroès.