There have been philosophers who sought to preserve and ratify the dictates’ common sense, and there have been philosophers who were willing to overturn and correct those dictates. And then there was Averroes. His most notorious doctrine is not just counterintuitive. It commits him to something that seems self-evidently false, namely that there is only a single mind to which all human thought is related. As his most famous critic, Thomas Aquinas, pointed out, it seems simply obvious that we each have a mind of our own, and that we can each think as individuals. Averroes—to use the Latinized version of his name, Ibn Rushd—seemed to deny this in his Long Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul, triggering a protracted debate in Latin medieval and Renaissance philosophy.1 Why spill so much ink over such an implausible theory? Part of the reason was surely Averroes’s stature as the most...

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