name "Avicenna." He is probably the most significant philosopher in
the Islamic tradition and arguably the most influential philosopher of
the pre-modern era. Born in Afshana near Bukhara in Central Asia in
about 980, he is best known as a polymath, as a physician whose major
work the Canon (al-Qanun fi'l-Tibb) continued to be taught as a
medical textbook in Europe and in the Islamic world until the early
modern period, and as a philosopher whose major summa the Cure
(al-Shifa') had a decisive impact upon European scholasticism and
especially upon Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274).Primarily a metaphysical
philosopher of being who was concerned with understanding the self's
existence in this world in relation to its contingency, Ibn Sina's
philosophy is an attempt to construct a coherent and comprehensive
system that accords with the religious exigencies of Muslim culture.
As such, he may be considered to be the first major Islamic
philosopher. The philosophical space that he articulates for God as
the Necessary Existence lays the foundation for his theories of the
soul, intellect and cosmos. Furthermore, he articulated a development
in the philosophical enterprise in classical Islam away from the
apologetic concerns for establishing the relationship between religion
and philosophy towards an attempt to make philosophical sense of key
religious doctrines and even analyse and interpret the Qur'an. Recent
studies have attempted to locate him within the Aristotelian and
Neoplatonic traditions. His relationship with the latter is
ambivalent: although accepting some keys aspects such as an
emanationist cosmology, he rejected Neoplatonic epistemology and the
theory of the pre-existent soul. However, his metaphysics owes much to
the "Amonnian" synthesis of the later commentators on Aristotle and
discussions in legal theory and kalam on meaning, signification and
being. Apart from philosophy, Avicenna's other contributions lie in
the fields of medicine, the natural sciences, musical theory, and
mathematics. In the Islamic sciences ('ulum), he wrote a series of
short commentaries on selected Qur'anic verses and chapters that
reveal a trained philosopher's hermeneutical method and attempt to
come to terms with revelation. He also wrote some literary allegories
about whose philosophical value recent scholarship is vehemently at
odds.
His influence in medieval Europe spread through the translations of
his works first undertaken in Spain. In the Islamic world, his impact
was immediate and led to what Michot has called "la pandémie
avicennienne." When al-Ghazali led the theological attack upon the
heresies of the philosophers, he singled out Avicenna, and a
generation later when the Shahrastani gave an account of the doctrines
of the philosophers of Islam, he relied upon the work of Avicenna,
whose metaphysics he later attempted to refute in his Struggling
against the Philosophers (Musari'at al-falasifa). Avicennan
metaphysics became the foundation for discussions of Islamic
philosophy and philosophical theology. In the early modern period in
Iran, his metaphysical positions began to be displayed by a creative
modification that they underwent due to the thinkers of the school of
Isfahan, in particular Mulla Sadra (d. 1641).
1. Life and Times
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-Din
Bayhaqi's Tatimmat Siwan al-hikma. However, much of this material
ought to be carefully examined and critically evaluated. Gutas has
argued that the autobiography is a literary device to represent
Avicenna as a philosopher who acquired knowledge of all the
philosophical sciences through study and intuition (al-hads), a
cornerstone of his epistemological theory. Thus the autobiography is
an attempt to demonstrate that humans can achieve the highest
knowledge through intuition. The text is a key to understanding
Avicenna's view of philosophy: we are told that he only understood the
purpose of Aristotle's Metaphysics after reading al-Farabi's short
treatise on it, and that often when he failed to understand a problem
or solve the syllogism, he would resort to prayer in the mosque (and
drinking wine at times) to receive the inspiration to understand – the
doctrine of intuition. We will return to his epistemology later but
first what can we say about his life?
Avicenna was born in around 980 in Afshana, a village near Bukhara in
Transoxiana. His father, who may have been Ismaili, was a local
Samanid governor. At an early age, his family moved to Bukhara where
he studied Hanafi jurisprudence (fiqh) with Isma'il Zahid (d. 1012)
and medicine with a number of teachers. This training and the
excellent library of the physicians at the Samanid court assisted
Avicenna in his philosophical self-education. Thus, he claimed to have
mastered all the sciences by the age of 18 and entered into the
service of the Samanid court of Nuh ibn Mansur (r. 976-997) as a
physician. After the death of his father, it seems that he was also
given an administrative post. Around the turn of the millennium, he
moved to Gurganj in Khwarazm, partly no doubt to the eclipse of
Samanid rule after the Qarakhanids took Bukhara in 999. He then left
again 'through necessity' in 1012 for Jurjan in Khurasan to the south
in search no doubt for a patron. There he first met his disciple and
scribe Juzjani. After a year, he entered Buyid service as a physician,
first with Majd al-Dawla in Rayy and then in 1015 in Hamadan where he
became vizier of Shams al-Dawla. After the death of the later in 1021,
he once again sought a patron and became the vizier of the Kakuyid
'Ala' al-Dawla for whom he wrote an important Persian summa of
philosophy, the Danishnama-yi 'Ala'i (The Book of Knowledge for 'Ala'
al-Dawla). Based in Isfahan, he was widely recognized as a philosopher
and physician and often accompanied his patron on campaign. It was
during one of these to Hamadan in 1037 that he died of colic. An
arrogant thinker who did not suffer fools, he was fond of his
slave-girls and wine, facts which were ammunition for his later
detractors.
2. Works
Avicenna wrote his two earliest works in Bukhara under the influence
of al-Farabi. The first, a Compendium on the Soul (Maqala fi'l-nafs),
is a short treatise dedicated to the Samanid ruler that establishes
the incorporeality of the rational soul or intellect without resorting
to Neoplatonic insistence upon its pre-existence. The second is his
first major work on metaphysics, Philosophy for the Prosodist
(al-Hikma al-'Arudiya) penned for a local scholar and his first
systematic attempt at Aristotelian philosophy.
He later wrote three 'encyclopaedias'encyclopedias of philosophy. The
first of these is al-Shifa' (The Cure), a work modelled on the corpus
of the philosopher, namely. Aristotle, that covers the natural
sciences, logic, mathematics, metaphysics and theology. It was this
work that through its Latin translation had a considerable impact on
scholasticism. It was solicited by Juzjani and his other students in
Hamadan in 1016 and although he lost parts of it on a military
campaign, he completed it in Isfahan by 1027. The other two
encyclopaedias were written later for his patron the Buyid prince
'Ala' al-Dawla in Isfahan. The first, in Persian rather than Arabic is
entitled Danishnama-yi 'Ala'i (The Book of Knowledge for 'Ala'
al-Dawla) and is an introductory text designed for the layman. It
closely follows his own Arabic epitome of The Cure, namely al-Najat
(The Salvation). The Book of Knowledge was the basis of al-Ghazali's
later Arabic work Maqasid al-falasifa (Goals of the Philosophers). The
second, whose dating and interpretation have inspired debates for
centuries, is al-Isharat wa'l-Tanbihat (Pointers and Reminders), a
work that does not present completed proofs for arguments and reflects
his mature thinking on a variety of logical and metaphysical issues.
According to Gutas it was written in Isfahan in the early 1030s;
according to Michot, it dates from an earlier period in Hamadan and
possibly Rayy. A further work entitled al-Insaf (The Judgement) which
purports to represent a philosophical position that is radical and
transcends AristotelianisingAristotle's Neoplatonism is unfortunately
not extant, and debates about its contents are rather like the
arguments that one encounters concerning Plato's esoteric or unwritten
doctrines. One further work that has inspired much debate is The
Easterners (al-Mashriqiyun) or The Eastern Philosophy (al-Hikma
al-Mashriqiya) which he wrote at the end of the 1020s and is mostly
lost.
3. Avicenna Latinus
Avicenna's major work, The Cure, was translated into Latin in 12th and
13th century Spain (Toledo and Burgos) and, although it was
controversial, it had an important impact and raised controversies
inin medieval scholastic philosophy. In certain cases the Latin
manuscripts of the text predate the extant Arabic ones and ought to be
considered more authoritative. The main significance of the Latin
corpus lies in the interpretation for Avicennism andAvicennism, in
particular forregarding his doctrines on the nature of the soul and
his famous existence-essence distinction (more about that below)
andbelow), along with the debates and censure that they raised in
scholastic Europe, in particular in ParisEurope. This was particularly
the case in Paris, where Avicennism waslater proscribed in 1210.
However, the influence of his psychology and theory of knowledge upon
William of Auvergne and Albertus Magnus have been noted. More
significant is the impact of his metaphysics upon the work and thought
of Thomas Aquinas. His other major work to be translated into Latin
was his medical treatise the Canon, which remained a text-book into
the early modern period and was studied in centrescenters of medical
learning such as Padua.
4. Logic
Logic is a critical aspect of, and propaedeutic to, Avicennan
philosophy. His logical works follow the curriculum of late
Neoplatonism and comprise nine books, beginning with his version of
Porphyry's Isagoge followed by his understanding and modification of
the Aristotelian Organon, which included the Poetics and the Rhetoric.
On the age-old debate whether logic is an instrument of philosophy
(Peripatetic view) or a part of philosophy (Stoic view), he argues
that such a debate is futile and meaningless.
His views on logic represent a significant metaphysical approach, and
it could be argued generally that metaphysical concerns lead
Avicenna's arguments in a range of philosophical and non-philosophical
subjects. For example, he argues in The Cure that both logic and
metaphysics share a concern with the study of secondary intelligibles
(ma'qulat thaniya), abstract concepts such as existence and time that
are derived from primary concepts such as humanity and animality.
Logic is the standard by which concepts—or the mental "existence" that
corresponds to things that occur in extra-mental reality—can be judged
and hence has both implications for what exists outside of the mind
and how one may articulate those concepts through language. More
importantly, logic is a key instrument and standard for judging the
validity of arguments and hence acquiring knowledge. Salvation depends
on the purity of the soul and in particular the intellect that is
trained and perfected through knowledge. Of particular significance
for later debates and refutations is his notion that knowledge depends
on the inquiry of essential definitions (hadd) through syllogistic
reasoning. The problem of course arises when one tries to make sense
of an essential definition in a real, particular world, and when one's
attempts to complete the syllogism by striking on the middle term is
foiled because one's 'intuition' fails to grasp the middle term.
5. Ontology
From al-Farabi, Avicenna inherited the Neoplatonic emanationist scheme
of existence. Contrary to the classical Muslim theologians, he
rejected creation ex nihilo and argued that cosmos has no beginning
but is a natural logical product of the divine One. The
super-abundant, pure Good that is the One cannot fail to produce an
ordered and good cosmos that does not succeed him in time. The cosmos
succeeds God merely in logical order and in existence.
Consequently, Avicenna is well known as the author of one an important
and influential proof for the existence of God. This proof is a good
example of a philosopher's intellect being deployed for a theological
purpose, as was common in medieval philosophy. The argument runs as
follows: There is existence, or rather our phenomenal experience of
the world confirms that things exist, and that their existence is
non-necessary because we notice that things come into existence and
pass out of it. Contingent existence cannot arise unless it is made
necessary by a cause. A causal chain in reality must culminate in one
un-caused cause because one cannot posit an actual infinite regress of
causes (a basic axiom of Aristotelian science). Therefore, the chain
of contingent existents must culminate in and find its causal
principle in a sole, self-subsistent existent that is Necessary. This,
of course, is the same as the God of religion.
An important corollary of this argument is Avicenna's famous
distinction between existence and essence in contingents, between the
fact that something exists and what it is. It is a distinction that is
arguably latent in Aristotle although the roots of Avicenna's doctrine
are best understood in classical Islamic theology or kalam. Avicenna's
theory of essence posits three modalities: essences can exist in the
external world associated with qualities and features particular to
that reality; they can exist in the mind as concepts associated with
qualities in mental existence; and they can exist in themselves devoid
of any mode of existence. This final mode of essence is quite distinct
from existence. Essences are thus existentially neutral in themselves.
Existents in this world exist as something, whether human, animal or
inanimate object; they are 'dressed' in the form of some essence that
is a bundle of properties that describes them as composites. God on
the other hand is absolutely simple, and cannot be divided into a
bundle of distinct ontological properties that would violate his
unity. Contingents, as a mark of their contingency, are conceptual and
ontological composites both at the first level of existence and
essence and at the second level of properties. Contingent things in
this world come to be as mentally distinct composites of existence and
essence bestowed by the Necessary.
This proof from contingency is also sometimes termed "radical
contingency." Later arguments raged concerning whether the distinction
was mental or real, whether the proof is ontological or cosmological.
The clearest problem with Avicenna's proofs lies in the famous Kantian
objection to ontological arguments: is existence meaningful in itself?
Further, Cantor's solution to the problem of infinity may also be seen
as a setback to the argument from the impossibility of actual
infinites.
Avicenna's metaphysics is generally expressed in Aristotelian terms.
The quest to understand being qua being subsumes the philosophical
notion of God. Indeed, as we have seen divine existence is a
cornerstone of his metaphysics. Divine existence bestows existence and
hence meaning and value upon all that exists. Two questions that were
current were resolved through his theory of existence. First,
theologians such as al-Ash'ari and his followers were adamant in
denying the possibility of secondary causality; for them, God was the
sole agent and actor in all that unfolded. Avicenna's metaphysics,
although being highly deterministic because of his view of radical
contingency, still insists of the importance of human and other
secondary causality. Second, the age-old problem was discussed: if God
is good, how can evil exist? Divine providence ensures that the world
is the best of all possible worlds, arranged in the rational order
that one would expect of a creator akin to the demiurge of the
Timaeus. But while this does not deny the existence of evil in this
world of generation and corruption, some universal evil does not exist
because of the famous Neoplatonic definition of evil as the absence of
good. Particular evils in this world are accidental consequences of
good. Although this deals with the problem of natural evils, the
problem of moral evils and particularly 'horrendous' evils remains.
6. Epistemology
The second most influential idea of Avicenna is his theory of the
knowledge. The human intellect at birth is rather like a tabula rasa,
a pure potentiality that is actualized through education and comes to
know. Knowledge is attained through empirical familiarity with objects
in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts. It is
developed through a syllogistic method of reasoning; observations lead
to prepositional statements, which when compounded lead to further
abstract concepts. The intellect itself possesses levels of
development from the material intellect (al-'aql al-hayulani), that
potentiality that can acquire knowledge to the active intellect
(al-'aql al-fa'il), the state of the human intellect at conjunction
with the perfect source of knowledge.
But the question arises: how can we verify if a proposition is true?
How do we know that an experience of ours is veridical? There are two
methods to achieve this. First, there are the standards of formal
inference of arguments —Is the argument logically sound? Second, and
most importantly, there is a transcendent intellect in which all the
essences of things and all knowledge resides. This intellect, known as
the Active Intellect, illuminates the human intellect through
conjunction and bestows upon the human intellect true knowledge of
things. Conjunction, however, is episodic and only occurs to human
intellects that have become adequately trained and thereby actualized.
The active intellect also intervenes in the assessment of sound
inferences through Avicenna's theory of intuition. A syllogistic
inference draws a conclusion from two prepositional premises through
their connection or their middle term. It is sometimes rather
difficult to see what the middle term is; thus when someone reflecting
upon an inferential problem suddenly hits upon the middle term, and
thus understands the correct result, she has been helped through
intuition (hads) inspired by the active intellect. There are various
objections that can be raised against this theory, especially because
it is predicated upon a cosmology widely refuted in the
post-Copernican world.
One of the most problematic implications of Avicennan epistemology
relates to God's knowledge. The divine is pure, simple and immaterial
and hence cannot have a direct epistemic relation with the particular
thing to be known. Thus Avicenna concluded while God knows what
unfolds in this world, he knows things in a 'universal manner' through
the universal qualities of things. God only knows kinds of existents
and not individuals. This resulted in the famous condemnation by
al-Ghazali who said that Avicenna's theory amounts to a heretical
denial of God's knowledge of particulars. particulars.
7. Psychology
Avicenna's epistemology is predicated upon a theory of soul that is
independent of the body and capable of abstraction. This proof for the
self in many ways prefigures by 600 years the Cartesian cogito and the
modern philosophical notion of the self. It demonstrates the
Aristotelian base and Neoplatonic structure of his psychology. This is
the so-called 'flying man' argument or thought experiment found at the
beginning of his Fi'-Nafs/De Anima (Treatise on the Soul). If a person
were created in a perfect state, but blind and suspended in the air
but unable to perceive anything through his senses, would he be able
to affirm the existence of his self? Suspended in such a state, he
cannot affirm the existence of his body because he is not empirically
aware of it, thus the argument may be seen as affirming the
independence of the soul from the body, a form of dualism. But in that
state he cannot doubt that his self exists because there is a subject
that is thinking, thus the argument can be seen as an affirmation of
the self-awareness of the soul and its substantiality. This argument
does raise an objection, which may also be levelled at Descartes: how
do we know that the knowing subject is the self?
This rational self possesses faculties or senses in a theory that
begins with Aristotle and develops through Neoplatonism. The first
sense is common sense (al-hiss al-mushtarak) which fuses information
from the physical senses into an epistemic object. The second sense is
imagination (al-khayal) which processes the image of the perceived
epistemic object. The third sense is the imaginative faculty
(al-mutakhayyila) which combines images in memory, separates them and
produces new images. The fourth sense is estimation or prehension
(wahm) that translates the perceived image into its significance. The
classic example for this innovative sense is that of the sheep
perceiving the wolf and understanding the implicit danger. The final
sense is where the ideas produced are stored and analyzed and ascribed
meanings based upon the production of the imaginative faculty and
estimation. Different faculties do not compromise the singular
integrity of the rational soul. They merely provide an explanation for
the process of intellection.
8. Mysticism and Oriental Philosophy
Was Avicenna a mystic? Some of his interpreters in Iran have answered
in the positive, citing the lost work The Easterners that on the face
of it has a superficial similarity to the notion of Ishraqi or
Illuminationist, intuitive philosophy expounded by Suhrawardi (d.
1191) and the final section of Pointers that deal with the terminology
of mysticism and Sufism. The question does not directly impinge on his
philosophy so much since The Easterners is mostly non-extant. But it
is an argument relating to ideology and the ways in which modern
commentators and scholars wish to study Islamic philosophy as a purely
rational form of inquiry or as a supra-rational method of
understanding reality. Gutas has been most vehement in his denial of
any mysticism in Avicenna. For him, Avicennism is rooted in the
rationalism of the Aristotelian tradition. Intuition does not entail
mystical disclosure but is a mental act of conjunction with the active
intellect. The notion of intuition is located itself by Gutas in
Aristotle's Posterior Analytics 89b10-11. While some of the mystical
commentators of Avicenna have relied upon his pseudo-epigraphy (such
as some sort of Persian Sufi treatises and the Mi'rajnama), one ought
not to throw the baby out with the bath water. The last sections of
Pointers are significant evidence of Avicenna's acceptance of some key
epistemological possibilities that are present in mystical knowledge
such as the possibility of non-discursive reason and simple knowledge.
Although one can categorically deny that he was a Sufi (and indeed in
his time the institutions of Sufism were not as established as they
were a century later) and even raise questions about his adherence to
some form of mysticism, it would be foolish to deny that he flirts
with the possibilities of mystical knowledge in some of his later
authentic works.
9. The Avicennan Tradition and His Legacy
Avicenna's major achievement was to propound a philosophically
defensive system rooted in the theological fact of Islam, and its
success can be gauged by the recourse to Avicennan ideas found in the
subsequent history of philosophical theology in Islam. In the Latin
West, his metaphysics and theory of the soul had a profound influence
on scholastic arguments, and as in the Islamic East, was the basis for
considerable debate and argument. Just two generations after him,
al-Ghazali (d. 1111) and al-Shahrastani (d. 1153) in their attacks
testify to the fact that no serious Muslim thinker could ignore him.
They regarded Avicenna as the principal representative of philosophy
in Islam. In the later Iranian tradition, Avicenna's thought was
critically distilled with mystical insight, and he became known as a
mystical thinker, a view much disputed in more recent scholarship.
Nevertheless the major works of Avicenna, The Cure and Pointers,
became the basis for the philosophical curriculum in the madrasa.
Numerous commentaries, glosses and super-glosses were composed on them
and continued to be produced into the 20th century. While our current
views on cosmology, the nature of the self, and knowledge raise
distinct problems for Avicennan ideas, they do not address the
important issue of why his thought remained so influential for such a
long period of time. In In recent times, Avicenna has been attacked by
some contemporary Arab Muslim thinkers in search of a new rationalism
within Arab culture, one that champions Averroes against Avicenna.
10. References and Further Reading
a. The Latin Avicenna (mainly sections of al-Shifa')
* Liber de anima seu sextus de naturalibus I-III. ed. Simone van
Riet, Leiden, 1972.
* Liber de philosophia prima sive scientia divina I-IV. ed. Simone
van Riet, Leidin, 1977.
* Liber de pilosophia prima sive scientia divina V-X. ed. Simone
van Riet, Leiden, 1980.
* Liber primus naturalium: Tractatus primus de causis et
principiis naturalium. ed. Simone van Riet, Leiden, 1992.
* Liber quartus naturalium de actionibus et passionibus qualitatum
primarum. ed. Simone van Riet, Leiden, 1989.
b. Studies in Avicenna Latinus
* (eds), Islam and the Italian Renaissance. eds. Charles Burnett
and Anna Contadini. Warburg Institute, 1999.
* N. G. Siraisi, Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: The Canon and
Medical Teaching in Italian Universities after 1500, Princeton, 1987.
* Dag Hasse, Avicenna's De Anima in the Latin West, London, 2000.
o A study of the impact of Avicennan psychology upon the
scholastics focusing on five key issues
c. Selected Works of Avicenna Available in European Language Translation
* Epistola sulla vita future (Risalat al-Adhawiyya fi'l-ma'ad),
tr. F. Luchetta, Padua, 1969.
o Compare it with this useful and critical commentary by the
theologian Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) – Yahya Michot, 'A Mamluk
theologian's commentary on Avicenna's Risala Adhawiyya', Journal of
Islamic Studies 14 (2003), 149-203, 309-63.
* The Life of Ibn Sina, tr. William Gohlman, Albany, 1974.
* Avicenna's De Anima (Fi'l-Nafs), tr. F. Rahman, London, 1954.
* Livre de directives et remarques (al-Isharat wa'l-Tanbihat), tr.
Anne-Marie Goichon, 2 vols., Paris, 1951.
* Remarks and Admonitions Part One: Logic (al-Isharat
wa'l-Tanbihat: mantiq), tr. Shams Inati, Toronto, 1984.
* La Métaphysique du Shifa' I-IV et V-X, tr. G. Anawati, Paris, 1978-86.
* Le livre de science (Danishnama-yi 'Ala'i) I: Logique,
Métaphysique II: science naturelle, mathématique, trs. M. Achena and
Henri Massé, Paris, 1986.
* Ibn Sina on Mysticism (al-Isharat wa'l-Tanbihat namat IX), tr.
Shams Inati, London, 1998.
* The Metaphysica of Avicenna (Ilahiyyat-i Danishnama-yi 'Ala'i),
tr. Parviz Morewedge, New York, 1972; rpt., Binghamton, 2003.
* Lettre au Vizier Abu Sa'd, ed./tr. Yahya Michot, Paris, 2000.
* The Metaphysics of Avicenna (al-Ilahiyyat min Kitab al-Shifa'),
ed./tr. Michael Marmura, Provo, 2004.
d. General Introductions to Avicenna and His Thought
* Cruz Hernández, Miguel. La vida de Avicena. Salamanca, 1997.
o A short and accessible intellectual biography written by
perhaps the foremost Spanish historian of Islamic philosophy.
* Goichon, Anne-Marie. Lexique de la langue philosophique
d'Avicenne. Paris, 1938.
o A pioneering work which remains a highly useful research tool.
* Goodman, Lenn. Avicenna. London, 1992.
o Although an attempt by a contemporary philosopher to come
to grips with the enduring contributions of Avicenna to philosophy, it
suffers from some serious textual misreadings.
* Gutas, Dimitri. Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition.
Leiden/Boston, 1988.
o A solid work of scholarship that discusses Avicenna's
corpus and thought within a paradigm of Islamic Aristotelianism.
* Nasr, Sayyed Hossein. Three Muslim Sages. Cambridge, 1966.
o An old and contentious presentation of Avicenna as a
polymath rooted in the mystical experience of God.
* Sebti, Miriam. Avicenne. Paris, 2003.
o An interpretation from a continental philosophical approach.
* Street, Tony. Avicenna. Cambridge, 2005.
o A solid presentation of the key ideas based on the most
up-to-date research.
e. Collections and Bibliographies
* Special Issue of Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica
medievale. Padua, 8 (1997) on Avicenna.
* Special Issue of Arabic Sciences and Philosophy. Cambridge, 10
(2000) on Avicenna.
* Anawati, G. C. Essai de bibliographie avicennienne. Cairo, 1950.
* Various Authors, 'Avicenna', Encyclopaedia Iranica. New York, II, 66-110.
* Janssens, Jules. Bibliography of Works on Ibn Sina, 2 vols.
Leiden, 1991-99.
* Janssens, Jules and Daniel de Smet (ed). Avicenna and His
Heritage. Leuven, 2001.
o Proceedings from a 1999 conference that brought together
specialists on the Arabic and the Latin Avicenna and their legacies.
* Rashed, Roshdi and Jean Jolivet (eds), Etudes sur Avicenne, Paris, 1984.
o An excellent collection that includes insightful pieces on
Avicennan physics and metaphysics.
* David Reisman and Ahmed al-Rahim (eds), Before and After
Avicenna, Leiden/Boston, 2003.
o The proceedings of the First Conference of the Avicenna
Research Group (based at Yale).
* Robert Wisnovsky (ed), Aspects of Avicenna (Princeton Papers:
Interdisciplinary Journal of Middle East Studies, 9), Princeton, 2001.
o Includes two good pieces on Avicennan psychology.
f. Interpretations
* Arberry, Arthur J. Avicenna on Theology. London, 1954.
o Includes translations of texts and raises the interesting
question of what is 'Islamic' about Avicenna's 'Islamic philosophy'.
* Corbin, Henry. Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, Princeton, 1961.
o An influential and controversial interpretation of
Avicenna through the lens of the later Iranian tradition portraying
him as a mystic.
* Gardet, Louis. La pensée religieuse d'Avicenne, Paris, 1951.
* Heath, Peter. Allegory and Philosophy in Avicenna, Philadelphia, 1992.
o An interesting approach to allegory that draws on Corbin
and suffers from the assumption that the famous pseudo-Avicennan work
the Mi'rajnama is authentic.
* Lüling, G. 'Die anderer Avicenna', Zeitschrift der deutschen
MorganländischenGesellschaft Suppl III.1 (1977), 496-513.
* Marmura, Michael. 'Avicenna and the kalam', Zeitschrift für
arabisch-islamisch Wissenschaft (Frankfurt) 7 (1991-2), 172-206.
o Considers Avicenna's debt to the metaphysics of kalam.
* Marmura, Michael. 'Plotting the course of Avicenna's thought',
Journal of the American Oriental Society 111 (1991), 333-42.
o A critical assessment of Gutas's 1988 work.
* Michot, Yahya. 'La pandémie avicennienne', Arabica (Paris) 40
(1993), 287-344.
o On the widespread hegemony of Avicennan philosophy in
Islamic thought from the 12th Century.
* Thom, Paul. Medieval Modal Systems, London, 2004.
o The best study of Avicenna's modal logic and his
contributions to the field.
g. Avicenna's Oriental Philosophy
* Cruz Hernández, Miguel. 'El problema de la "auténtica" filosofía
de Avicena', Revista de Filosofía 5 (1992), 235-56.
* Gutas, Dimitri. 'Avicenna's Eastern ("Oriental") Philosophy',
Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 10 (2000), 159-80.
* Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 'Ibn Sina's Oriental Philosophy', in S. H.
Nasr and Oliver Leaman (eds), History of Islamic Philosophy,
London/New York, 1996, I, 247-51.
o A classic restatement of Nasr's mystical understanding of Avicenna.
* Pines, Shlomo. 'La philosophie orientale d'Avicenne', in The
Collected Works of Shlomo Pines Volume III, Jerusalem, 1996, 301-33.
o Interprets 'oriental' to signify an Eastern alternative
Peripatetism.
h. Metaphysics
* Robert Wisnovsky, Avicenna's Metaphysics in Context, London, 2003.
o An excellent study that locates the origins of Avicennan
thought in what he calls the 'Ammonian synthesis' in Late Antiquity
and then explains the development of Avicennan metaphysics.
i. On Psychology
* Helmut Gätje, Studien zur Überlieferung der aristotelische
Psychologie im Islam, Heidelberg, 1971.
o A pioneering study of the key aspects of
Aristotelian(ising) psychological theories in Islamic philosophy
focusing on Avicenna.
* Dag Hasse, Avicenna's De Anima in the Latin West, London, 2000.
o A study of the impact of Avicennan psychology upon the
scholastics focusing on five key issues.
* Michot, Jean R. La destinée de l'homme selon Avicenne, Brussels, 1986.
o A key investigation of Avicennan psychology as a quest for
an Islamic answer to the problem of the soul's journey beyond this
life and the persistence of personal identity.
* Rahman, Fazlur. Avicenna's Psychology, London, 1952.
o A study that includes a translation of Avicenna's De Anima.
j. Existence-Essence
* Goichon, Anne-Maria. La distinction de l'essence et l'existence
d'après ibn Sina (Avicenne), Paris, 1937.
* Mayer, Toby. 'Ibn Sina's Burhan al-Siddiqin', Journal of Islamic
Studies 12 (2001), 18-39.
* Parviz Morewedge, 'Philosophical analysis of Ibn Sina's
essence-existence distinction', Journal of the American Oriental
Society 92 (1972), 42-35.
* Rahman, Fazlur. 'Essence and existence in Avicenna', Mediaeval
Studies (Toronto) 4 (1958), 1-16.
* Rahman, Fazlur. 'Essence and existence in Ibn Sina: the myth and
the reality', Hamdard Islamicus (Karachi) 4 (1981), 3-14.
* Rizvi, Sajjad. 'Roots of an aporia in later Islamic philosophy:
the existence-essence distinction in the philosophies of Avicenna and
Suhrawardi', Studia Iranica (Paris) 29 (2000), 61-108.
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