Ibn Sina. His father having died in the meantime, he was forced to take up, but clearly had no difficulty in finding, a post in the financial administration of the Samanids. The wording itself of this acquisition of knowledge by the human intellect—“contact with the active intellect,” or receiving the “divine effluence”—has misled students of Avicenna into thinking that this “flow” of knowledge from the divine to the human intellect is automatic and due to God’s grace, or it is ineffable and mystical. Ibn Rushd was born in Cordova, Spain, to a family with a long and well-respected tradition of legal and public service. This difference applies to all things except God, said Ibn Sina. At some point in his later years, Avicenna wrote for or dictated to his student, companion, and amanuensis, Abū-ʿUbayd al-Jūzjānī, his Autobiography, reaching till the time in his middle years when they first met; al-Jūzjānī continued the biography after that point and completed it some time after the master’s death in 1037 AD. Ibn Sina’s natural philosophy. Regarded as one of the most influential thinkers and writers of the Islamic Golden Age, Ibn Sina wrote extensively on philosophy of ethics and metaphysics, medicine, astronomy, alchemy, geology psychology and Islamic theology. as it was intuitively acknowledged in the Islamic world where he is It is for this reason that we find Avicenna, involved in certain political/intellectual controversies in some of the cities in which he lived, addressing to political elites a scientific treatise instead of political oratory in his defense (Michot 2000; Reisman 2013, 14–22; Gutas 2014a, personal writings listed on p. 503). He went on to write seven more such summae in his career, ranging in length from a sixty-page booklet (Elements of Philosophy, ʿUyūn al-ḥikma, GS 3), written earlier in his career, to the monumental The Cure (al-Shifāʾ), in his middle period. 7–27. Born in Afshana, Bukhara in Central Asia, his work on medicine, specifically the Canon, or the Qanun fil Tibb, was taught in schools in the Islamic world and in Europe alike till the early modern era. Hasse, D.N., and A. Bertolacci (eds. medical Canon (GMed 1), often revised, formed the basis of The creation of the philosophical summa—and not only this particular first one for ʿArūḍī but especially the major work, The Cure, and the alluring and allusive Pointers and Reminders—had momentous consequences. Accordingly, some medieval bibliographies of his works (and some modern ones, based on the former) list close to three hundred titles, though a recent sober tally of them brings the authentic writings down to fewer than one hundred, ranging from essays of a few pages to multi-volume sets, and flags the pseudepigraphs that need to be assessed and authenticated (Gutas 2014a, Appendix, 387–540). In the court of ʿAlāʾ-ad-Dawla in Isfahan where he spent his last thirteen years or so, Avicenna enjoyed the appreciation that it was felt he deserved. Much work still remains to be done in this regard. His productivity never flagged, even during these years that were militarily and politically turbulent. 35 terms. with philosophy, or more specifically, with the philosophical sciences as classified and taught in the Aristotelian tradition. ), 2012, Heath, P., 1990, “Disorientation and Reorientation in Ibn Sina’s. This knowledge, which represents and accounts for reality and the way things are, also corresponds, Avicenna maintains, with what is found in books, i.e. In the polyphony of philosophical voices and systems that followed his death in 322 BC and throughout the Hellenistic period (336–31 BC), his suggestions went mostly unheeded by the Peripatetics and were only followed, at the end of that period, by Andronicus of Rhodes if only for the purposes of the order in which he put Aristotle’s school treatises (his extant corpus) in his first edition of them. This theory made the core of syllogistic verification by means of hitting upon the middle term the one indispensable element of all certain intellectual knowledge, and it explained why people differ in their ability to apply this syllogistic method by presupposing that they possess a varying talent for it, as with all human faculties. Faced with this situation, Avicenna set himself the task of revising and updating philosophy, as an internally self-consistent and complete system that accounts for all reality and is logically verifiable, by correcting errors in the tradition, deleting unsustainable arguments and theses, sharpening the focus of others, and expanding and adding to the subjects that demanded discussion. His father, originally from Balkh farther to the southeast who had moved north as a young man apparently in search of (better) employment, was a state functionary, a governor of the nearby district Kharmaythan. Despite his peregrinatory life spent in historically turbulent times and areas, including the frequently unfavorable personal circumstances in which he found himself (as recounted in the Autobiography and Biography, Gohlman 1974), Avicenna was terribly productive, even by the standards of the highly prolific authors writing in Arabic in medieval Islam. As he put it, “it behooves his [Aristotle’s] successors to gather the loose ends he left, repair any breach they find in what he constructed, and supply corollaries to fundamental principles he presented” (GS 8, 2–3; transl. According to the scientific view of the universe in his day which he studied in the curriculum—Aristotelian sublunar world with Ptolemaic cosmology and Neoplatonic emanationism in the supralunar—all intelligibles (all universal concepts and the principles of all particulars, or as Avicenna says, “the forms of things as they are in themselves”) were the eternal object of thought by the First principle, and then, in descending hierarchical order, by the intellects of the celestial spheres emanating from the First and ending with the active intellect (al-ʿaql al-faʿʿāl), the intellect of the terrestrial realm. He was also a logician, mathematician and a poet. Performance of the first task, necessarily entailed the second, bringing philosophy up to date. For example, Ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna), was a philosopher, physician and astronomer who also wrote on the subjects of alchemy, geography, geology, psychology, theology, logic, mathematics, physics and education. He wrote with the purpose of reaching all layers of (literate) society, but also with an eye to posterity. In the 14th century, the Moroccan wanderer Ibn Battuta allegedly spent nearly 30 years traveling some 75,000 miles across Africa, the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia. , The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2016 by The Metaphysics Research Lab, Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford University, Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054, 4. Avicenna (Ibn Sina) is the author of The Canon of Medicine. 35 terms. On coming to be and passing away (Aristotle’s, Arithmetic (Nicomachus of Gerasa, Diophantus, Euclid, Thābit b. Qurra, and others), Universal Science: the study of being as being, first philosophy, natural theology (Aristotle’s, Metaphysics of the Rational Soul (phenomena of religious and paranormal life studied as functions of the rational soul), Prophetic legislation as the basis for the three parts of practical philosophy, Politics (prescriptions by the prophet legislator for public administration and political ruler to succeed him; [Plato’s and Aristotle’s books on politics]), Household management (prescriptions of the prophet legislator for family law; [Bryson’s, Ethics (as legislated by a caliph; [Aristotle’s, Adamson, P., 2004, “Non-Discursive Thought in Avicenna’s Commentary on the Theology of Aristotle,” in, Biesterfeldt, H.H., 2000. Patronage and Learning in Medieval Islam,” in Adamson 2013, pp. It is important to realize that this is not because the intellect does not have the constitution to have purely intellective knowledge, like the celestial spheres, but because its existence in the sublunar world of time and perishable matter precludes its understanding the intelligibles through their causes. At the basic level there is discursive thinking in which the intellect proceeds to construct syllogisms step by step with the aid of the internal and external senses, and acquires the intelligibles by hitting upon the middle terms (something which in emanationist terms—but also, though less conspicuously, Aristotelian—is described as coming into “contact” with the active intellect, to be discussed further below, note 6). This was an age of science and philosophy and art and mathematics, an Islamic golden age, and at the heart of it was Avicenna. Verifiability depends on two interdependent factors for the person doing the verification: following a productive method and having the mental apparatus to employ that method and understand its results. He also linked rational philosophy with interpretation of Quran, the holy book of muslims. Sources on his life range from his autobiography, written at the behest of his disciple ‘Abd al-Wahid Juzjani, his private correspondence, including the collection of philosophical epistles exchanged with his disciples and known as al-Mubahathat (The Discussions), to legends and doxographical views embedded in the ‘histories of philosophy’ of medieval Islam such as Ibn al-Qifti’s Ta’rikh al-hukama (History of the Philosophers) and Zahir al … In fact ibn Sina does not present geometry as a deductive system from axioms in this work. “Geometry and the Rebirth of Philosophy in Arabic with al‑Kindī,” in, –––, 2004b, “Avicenna’s Marginal Glosses on, –––, 2006a, “Intellect Without Limits: The Absence of Mysticism in Avicenna,” in, –––, 2006b, “Imagination and Transcendental Knowledge in Avicenna,” in, –––, 2012a, “Platon. To these philosophers should be added the philosophically sophisticated theologians of the various Muʿtazilite branches (one of whose most prominent representatives, the judge ʿAbd-al-Jabbār, Avicenna may have met in Ray between 1013 and 1015). (Geoffroy et al. Toward the end of his life Avicenna wrote two more summae in slightly divergent modes. Ibn Sina [Avicenna]: metaphysics | Ibn Rushd’s father, Abdul-Qasim Ahmad, although not as venerated as his grandfather, hel… This is also evident in his disregard (rather than neglect?) It is this understanding that enabled Avicenna to have a progressive view of the history of philosophy and set the framework for his philosophical project. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools. He completed there his major work, The Cure (al-Shifāʾ, GS 5), and four further summae of philosophy, along with shorter treatises, and conducted a vigorous philosophical correspondence with students and followers in response to questions they raised about sundry points in logic, physics, and metaphysics. According to this document, Avicenna was born in Afshana, a village in the outskirts of metropolitan Bukhara, some time in the 70s of the tenth century, perhaps as early as 964; it has not been possible to determine the year of his birth with greater philosophy influenced mightily the medieval and Renaissance In the history of philosophical thought in the Medieval Ages, the figure of Ibn Sina (370/980-428/1037)1 is, in many respects, unique, while among the Muslim philosophers, it is not only unique but has been paramount right up to modern times. Gutas 2014a, 206–208). He was the most renowned philosopher of medieval Islam and the most influential name in medicine from 1100 to 1500. Avicenna (ăvĭsĕn`ə), Arabic Ibn Sina, 980–1037, Islamic philosopher and physician, of Persian origin, b. near Bukhara. In an effort to reach a wider audience, he expressed his theories on the rational soul in two allegories, Alive, Son of Awake (Ḥayy b. Yaqẓān, GM 7; Goichon 1959) and The Bird (GM 8; Heath 1990), and he versified still others: The Divine Pearl (al-Jumāna al-ilāhiyya) on the oneness of God and the emanated creation in 334 verses (GM 9), The Science of Logic, in verse, in 290 lines (GL 4), and a number of poems on medical subjects, notably his Medicine, in verse, in 1326 lines (GMed 27), which was commented upon by Averroes. The philosophical knowledge that Avicenna received was neither complete nor homogeneous. *Definition:* Baghdad, the center for research and translation of scientific, medical, and philosophical texts. In other words, if we seek to verify the statement “A is C,” we must look for a suitable B to construct a syllogism of the form, “A is B, B is C, therefore A is C.” The significance of the middle term is discussed in the Posterior Analytics (I.34), where Aristotle further specifies, “Acumen is a talent for hitting upon (eustochia) the middle term in an imperceptible time” (Barnes 1994 transl.). He died in 1037 in Hamadhan and was buried there. But the social context in which philosophy now found itself had changed. It runs to twenty-two large volumes in the Cairo edition (1952–83), and its contents exhibit all the parts of philosophy in the Aristotelian tradition which they reproduce, revise, adjust, expand, and re-present, as follows: Avicenna did not treat all of these subjects in each one of his summae, but he varied their contents and emphasis depending on the specific purpose for which he composed them. for keeping copies of his works; as it must have happened rather frequently, when commissioned or asked to write about a subject that he had treated earlier, it was apparently just as easy for him to compose a treatise anew as it was to copy an earlier version of it. Avicenna lived his philosophy, and his desire to communicate it beyond what his personal circumstances required, as an intellectual in the public eye, is manifest in the various compositional styles and different registers of language that he used. philosophers and scholars, just as the Latin translation of his It comes about after prolonged engagement with intellective techniques through syllogistic means until the human intellect is not obstructed by the internal or external senses and has acquired a certain familiarity or “intimacy” with its object, “without, however, the middle term ceasing to be present.” This kind of intellection is accompanied by an emotive state of joy and pleasure (Gutas 2006a,b). Ibn-Sīnā [Avicenna] (ca. The first two bind humans to the earth, and the rational psyche connects them to God. Each philosopher, through his own syllogistic reasoning and ability to hit correctly upon the middle terms, modifies and completes the work of his predecessors, and reaches a level of knowledge that is an ever closer approximation of the intelligible world, of the intelligibles as contained in the intellects of the spheres, and hence of truth itself. The translation of the Arabic versions of the Aristotelian corpus, the commentaries, and the abridgments produced a cultural turning point in the intellectual history of the Western world. He also wrote a definitive history of Muslim North Africa. Ibn Battuta was born in the medina (non-European quarter) of Tangier, Morocco, 25 February 1304 CE. Bukhara was no backwater provincial town, teeming as it was with scholars in residence and visiting intellectuals. 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