stylistic:tone, linguistic:voice_change
Commentaries on Aristotle

Averroes wrote commentaries on nearly all of Aristotle's surviving works. The only exception is Politics, which he did not have access to, so he wrote commentaries on Plato's Republic. He classified his commentaries into three categories that modern scholars have named short, middle and long commentaries. Most of the short commentaries (jami) were written early in his career and contain summaries of Aristotlean doctrines. The middle commentaries (talkhis) contain paraphrases that clarify and simplify Aristotle's original text. The middle commentaries were probably written in response to his patron caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf's complaints about the difficulty of understanding Aristotle's original texts and to help others in a similar position. The long commentaries (tafsir or sharh), or line-by-line commentaries, include the complete text of the original works with a detailed analysis of each line. The long commentaries are very detailed and contain a high degree of original thought, and were unlikely to be intended for a general audience. Only five of Aristotle's works had all three types of commentaries: Physics, Metaphysics, On the Soul, On the Heavens, and Posterior Analytics.