Ibn Bajjah and the Solitary Path to Happiness

Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Yahya ibn Bajjah, known in the Latin West as Avempace (c. 1085–1138), was born in Zaragoza and rose to prominence as vizier to the Almoravid governor of that city before the Christian reconquest of Zaragoza in 1118 forced him to relocate, eventually to Fez in present-day Morocco, where he died in 1138, reportedly poisoned by a rival. He was renowned in his own lifetime not only as a philosopher but as an accomplished physician, astronomer, mathematician, and musician, embodying the polymathic ideal of the falsafa tradition inherited from al-Farabi and Avicenna in the Islamic East. His surviving philosophical corpus is fragmentary and often unfinished, transmitted through manuscripts that were never fully edited even by Ibn Bajjah himself, yet his central ideas exerted a demonstrable influence on his Andalusian successors Ibn Tufayl and Averroes, both of whom explicitly engaged with his positions.