Meaning and Analogy in Averroes' Psychology and Metaphysics

In his Long Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics, Averroes claims that much of the argument of the early and middle books of the Metaphysics centers around giving meanings (maʿānī) to various concepts, but he is surprisingly vague about what constitute those meanings. I claim that Averroes' explanation of meaning, or “intention,” as the term is often rendered by Averroes' Latin translations, comes in his commentaries on the De Anima. While Averroes' views on the implications of and grounds for what is often called intentionality are different in each of his three commentaries on the De Anima, his understanding of what constitutes a “meaning” (or “intention”) is pretty consistent. Meanings of things from the outside world are conveyed to the soul through sensation, and acts of imagination and even intellection are interpretations or understandings of these or different intellectual meanings. It turns out that the interpretation of these meanings is done through relation and analogy. Thus, analogy is crucial for finding intellectual meanings and consequently for metaphysics. Once the account of meaning in the De Anima is clarified, certain passages of the Long Commentary on the Metaphysics become clear. My aim is to show how for Averroes a significant part of the metaphysical enterprise is structured around analogical reasoning.