PhilosophersAvicenne (Ibn Sina)

Avicenne (Ibn Sina)

The soul knows it exists before any body: the flying man.

Falsafa (Arabic Aristotelianism)vers 980 – 1037 IranPhilosopher (falsafa)MetaphysicianPhysicianLogician
وجدتها قد غفلت عن كل شيء، إلا عن ثبوت إنيتها
You would find it attentive to nothing, except to the fact that it exists. Pointers and Reminders, namat 3, on the flying man (our translation).
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فالفرسية فى نفسها فرسية فقط
Horseness, in itself, is only horseness. Metaphysics, V, 1: the nature "horse", taken in itself, is neither one nor many, neither existing nor non-existing.
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إن الأول لا ماهية له غير الإنية
The First has no quiddity other than His existence. Metaphysics, VIII, 4.
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ونسبته إلى نفوسنا نسبة الشمس إلى أبصارنا
It is to our souls what the sun is to our eyes. On the Soul, V, 5, on the agent intellect (our translation).
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إن هذا حكم الصديقين الذين يستشهدون به، لا عليه
Such is the way of the truthful, who take God as witness of everything, rather than things as witnesses of God. Pointers and Reminders, namat 4 (our translation).
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Misconceptions

Nuanced
Descartes copied Avicenna's flying man to invent the cogito.

The resemblance is real: in both cases I am certain I exist while setting my body aside. Avicenna's On the Soul had circulated in Latin in Europe since the 12th century. But nothing proves that Descartes read it, and the aims differ: Descartes seeks a certainty that withstands doubt; Avicenna wants to "awaken" the reader to the fact that the soul is something other than the body. The influence remains debated.

Nuanced
For Avicenna the world is eternal, so it was not created.

He does hold that the world did not begin in time. But he calls it created: to be created is to receive one's existence from another, and everything that is not God receives it from him at every moment. Al-Ghazali will judge that an eternal world cannot be truly created.

Nuanced
For Avicenna, God does not know particular things.

This is al-Ghazali's accusation, which he judges contrary to Islam. Avicenna actually writes that God knows everything "in a universal way", through causes, and that no individual thing escapes him, "not even the weight of an atom". The debate is about the manner: can a God who never changes know what is happening now?