Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Ṭufayl, the Islamic philosopher, was known to medieval Scholastics as Abubacer. Few details are known about the life of Ibn Ṭufayl, who was born at Guadix in the province of Granada and died in Morocco. Like all his colleagues, he was a scholar whose knowledge was encyclopedic; he was a mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and poet. He served as vizier for and was a friend of the Almohad sovereign Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf, and it was he who recommended that his friend Averroes be assigned the task of analyzing the works of Aristotle. Ibn Ṭufayl became known to medieval Scholastics (Abū Bakr having become Abubacer) through Averroes's translation of De Anima, which contained a brief criticism of Ibn Ṭufayl's doctrine identifying the possible (or passive...