Abstract
In 1848, Ernest Renan abandoned the publication of L'Avenir de la science and began writing a thesis on Averroès. Published in 1852, Averroès et l'averroïsme forms a sort of triptych with De philosophia peripatetica apud syros, published the same year, and the lecture on L'islamisme et la science, published in the Journal des débats on March 30, 1883. Renan's interest in Averroism can only be understood in conjunction with the theoretical and practical concerns expressed in L'Avenir de la science : his work on Averroès was the first blow to what he called "old philosophy". The main target is less "Ibn Roschd" himself, whose "black legend" is patiently dismantled, than the Italian Averroism of the 16th century, that of the School of Padua, a "philosophy of professors", promoted to the rank of paradigm of a disastrous "extension of scholasticism into the heart of modern times", from which only the alliance of "positive science" and philology can deliver man and society. Like scholasticism, however, Averroism has two faces: "insignificant as a philosophy", it "acquires a real historical interest, when considered as having served as a pretext for the independence of thought". It is this "apparent contradiction" that interests Renan. Averroès et l'averroïsme is, in this sense, the manifesto of Renan's conception of history, its methods and its objects. Hence the famous phrase to put into perspective: "The history of Averroism is, strictly speaking, but the history of a vast counter-sense".
