Agostino Nifo on the Force that Keeps the World Together: Reading Averroes’s Destructio Destructionum in Fifteenth-Century Padua

Agostino Nifo was one of the most committed investigators and active disseminators of Averroes’s philosophy during the Renaissance. Indeed, his attitude towards Averroes and the Averroist legacies has something of a nerdy demeanour, in that the high standards of his academic expertise on Aristotelianism are always paired with a level of exegetic scrupulousness verging on pedantry when it comes to explaining and divulging Averroes’s oeuvre. Among his great accomplishments in this field, Nifo is the author of a formidable commentary on Averroes’s Destructio destructionum, the Taha-fut al-Taha-fut (“The Incoherence of the Incoherence”), written by Averroes in the second half of the twelfth century in response to al-Ghaza-lı-’s Taha-fut al-Fala-sifah (“The Incoherence of the Philosophers”). This article makes a case for the cosmological and theological relevance of Nifo’s Commentary within the panorama of Renaissance philosophy, and it argues that Averroes’s theory of cosmic interconnectivity (colligatio) helped Nifo qualify his views on the intellect and set the scene for the emerging theological political quandary of the early modern period.