ABSTRACT
Knowledge: Between the Global and the Local In the nineteenth century, the French thinker Ernest Renan (1823-1892), used the expression ‘Latin Averroïsm’ to describe and qualify western philosophical doctrines of the thirteenth century that came to know the Aristotelian legacy through Muslim scholars and philosophers. In his seminal work, Thinking in the Middle Ages [Penser au Moyen Âge], the philosopher Alain de Libera, adds that ‘Latin Averroïsm’ constituted a kind of intellectual movement around the Sorbonne and contributed signicantly to the shaping of the role of the Sorbonne’s intellectuals. Indicatively, in its time, what has come to be known as ‘Latin Averroïsm’ was rather known as ‘Arabism’. De Libera insists that this was not an East versus West encounter, or a unilateral transfer of knowledge. It rather illustrates the fact that intellectuals in Medieval societies in Europe and the Muslim world were sharing debates across religious divides, around questions of faith and reason (de Libera, 1991. See also Le Go, 1985).1
