Avicenne (Ibn Sina)
The soul knows it exists before any body: the flying man.
Avicenne (Ibn Sina) (vers 980 – 1037, Central Asia and Persia: Bukhara, Gurganj, Rayy, Hamadan, Isfahan) : falsafa (arabic aristotelianism). Avicenna takes up Aristotle and transforms him. He distinguishes what a thing is (its essence) from the fact that it exists: I can know what a triangle is without knowing whether one exists. On AskPhilosophy: 3 reconstructed arguments, 5 quotes checked word for word against the original texts, and 3 common beliefs examined; every text carries an authenticity badge (written by the author, posthumous, student notes, reported, apocryphal).
Why he matters
He is the most influential philosopher of medieval Islam: after him, almost every Muslim thinker, theologians included, discusses his theses, to follow or to fight them (al-Ghazali, Averroes). Translated into Latin in Toledo in the 12th century, he left his mark on all of Scholasticism: Aquinas owes him the distinction between essence and existence. His Canon of Medicine was taught in European universities until the 17th century.
His times
Born near Bukhara, capital of the Samanids, he was, according to his autobiography, a child prodigy: physician to the prince at seventeen, he had access to the great royal library. After the fall of the Samanids he spent his life moving from court to court (Gurganj, Rayy, Hamadan, Isfahan), sometimes as physician, sometimes as vizier, at times in prison or on the run. He wrote the Shifa' partly at night, between his political duties. He died in Hamadan in 1037, ill, during a military campaign of his prince.
Reading his texts
We quote Avicenna's Arabic and, where it exists, the Latin translation made in Toledo in the 12th century (it is through this Latin that Europe read him). For the Metaphysics we also give Anawati's French translation (excerpts) and Marmura's English. For the flying man no free translation is available: the translation offered is our own, and we say so.
His positions
click a row to see the evidenceA Muslim and a theist: he demonstrates the existence of a single "existent necessary in itself", from which everything else receives its existence. But his God creates by necessity, from all eternity, not by a choice that begins in time: this is what al-Ghazali will hold against him.
The senses provide particular cases, and the mind draws general ideas from them. But what brings our intellect from potency to act is an "agent intellect" outside us, which lights up the mind as the sun lights up the eyes. A rationalism that keeps a place for experience.
There are first principles, true in themselves, from which everything else is demonstrated. Rigorous demonstration yields certain knowledge.
A dualist: the human soul, which receives ideas, is neither a body nor a faculty lodged in a body. The flying man serves to "awaken" us to this truth; the demonstration is elsewhere in On the Soul.
Whatever is possible exists only when its cause makes it necessary: in his system nothing happens without being necessitated by its causes. He does not deny that man deliberates and chooses, but scholars debate how much room is left for free will.
Judgements such as "lying is base" or "injustice is base" are, for him, widely accepted opinions, not self-evident truths of reason; he adds that they become rational once demonstrated. So the good is not arbitrary, but it is not self-evident either.
Reason demonstrates the essentials (God, the soul, the soul's happiness after death), and prophecy confirms them. For the resurrection of bodies, he grants that only the revealed Law teaches it: reason cannot prove it.
True happiness belongs to the soul: drawing close to the "First Truth" by knowing it. Bodily pleasures are nothing beside it.
Man is perfectible: his soul can move from a mere capacity to think to actual knowledge, and whoever unites practical and theoretical wisdom is happy. But his passions must be governed by reason.
Man cannot live alone; life together requires a law, and a lawgiver (the prophet) who does not leave each person to judge what is just as he pleases. He goes as far as writing that whoever seizes power by force or money must be fought and killed.
A virtue ethics in Aristotle's manner: justice is the "mean" between excesses, and the chief virtues are temperance, practical wisdom and courage.