Averroes

Averroes (Ibn Rushd) of Córdoba was the supreme commentator on Aristotle — known to the Latins simply as 'the Commentator' — who sought to recover the true Aristotle from the Neoplatonic overlay of his predecessors. Against the theologian al-Ghazali's attack on philosophy, he wrote a famous defence, arguing that reason and revelation, rightly understood, cannot conflict but are two paths to the one truth.

His controversial doctrine of a single shared Intellect for all humanity, and his rigorous Aristotelianism, passed into the medieval universities as 'Latin Averroism', where his commentaries — translated and pored over alongside Aristotle's own works — helped set the terms of scholastic debate for centuries.