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Ibn Sina [Avicenna]

Abū-ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn-ʿAbdallāh Ibn-Sīnā [Avicenna] (ca. 970–1037) was the preeminent philosopher and physician of the Islamic world. [ 1 ] In his work he combined the disparate strands of philosophical/scientific [ 2 ] thinking in Greek late antiquity and early Islam into a rationally rigorous and self-consistent scientific system that encompassed and explained all reality, including the tenets of revealed religion and its theological and mystical elaborations. In its integral and comprehensive articulation of science and philosophy, it represents the culmination of the Hellenic tradition, defunct in Greek after the sixth century, reborn in Arabic in the 9 th (Gutas 2004a, 2010). It dominated intellectual life in the Islamic world for centuries to come, and the sundry reactions to it, ranging from acceptance to revision to refutation and to substitution with paraphilosophical constructs, determined developments in philosophy, science, religion, theology, and mysticism. In Latin translation, beginning with the 12 th century, Avicenna’s philosophy influenced mightily the medieval and Renaissance philosophers and scholars, just as the Latin translation of his medical Canon (GMed 1), often revised, formed the basis of medical instruction in European universities until the 17 th century. The Arabophone Jewish and Christian scholars within Islam, to the extent that they were writing for their respective communities and not as members of the Islamic commonwealth, accepted most of his ideas (notably Maimonides in his Arabic Guide of the Perplexed and Barhebraeus in his Syriac Cream of Wisdom ). The Jewish communities in Europe used Hebrew translations of some of his works, though they were far less receptive than their Roman Catholic counterparts, preferring Averroes instead. The Roman Orthodox in Constantinople were quite indifferent to philosophical developments abroad (and inimical to those at home) and came to know Avicenna’s name only through its occurrence in the Greek translations of the Latin scholastics that began after the 4 th Crusade. In his influence on the intellectual history of the world in the West (of India), he is second only to Aristotle, as it was intuitively acknowledged in the Islamic world where he is called “The Preeminent Master” ( al-shaykh al-raʾīs ), after Aristotle, whom Avicenna called “The First Teacher” ( al-muʿallim al-awwal ).

2. Philosophical Aims

3. logic and empiricism, 4. the metaphysics of the rational soul; practical philosophy, 5. conclusion, works by ibn sina, secondary sources, other internet resources, related entries, 1. life and works.

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. This auto-/biographical complex, which also contains bibliographies and has been transmitted as a single document (Gohlman 1974), is an early representative of an Arabic literary genre much cultivated by scientists and scholars in medieval Islam (Gutas 2015). It is also our most extensive source about Avicenna’s life and times. 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 precision. [ 3 ] 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. He was in the employ of the Persian Samanid dynasty that ruled Transoxania and Khurasan with Bukhara as its capital (819–1005), where the family moved when Avicenna was still a boy. Avicenna grew up and was educated there and began his philosophical career as a member of the educated elite in political circles close to the Samanids.

Bukhara lies on one of the main trade routes of the Silk Road between Samarkand and Marw, and like these and other cities along the Silk Road, had been economically and culturally active from pre-Islamic times. Under the Samanids in the 9 th and 10 th centuries, who followed a deliberate agenda of Persian linguistic revival as well as promotion of the high Arabic-Islamic culture radiating from the center of the Islamic world, Baghdad, it provided a sophisticated and refined milieu for the cultivation of the arts and sciences. The palace library of the Samanids, where the teenager Avicenna was allowed to visit and study following his successful treatment of the ailing ruler, contained such books on all subjects, including books by the ancient Greeks in Arabic translation, as he had never seen before nor since (Gohlman 1974, 37). This was the result of the cultural, scientific, and philosophical effervescence taking place in Baghdad due to the rationalistic outlook in political and social affairs espoused by the ʿAbbāsid dynasty upon its accession to power in 750 and the attendant Graeco-Arabic translation movement (Gutas 1998; Gutas 2014a, 359–62). Bukhara was no backwater provincial town, teeming as it was with scholars in residence and visiting intellectuals.

Avicenna had an excellent education on all subjects, but he dwells at length in the Autobiography on his study of the intellectual sciences, that is, the philosophical curriculum in practice in the Hellenic schools of higher education in late antiquity, notably in Alexandria. These consisted of logic as the instrument of philosophy (the Organon ), the theoretical sciences—physics (the natural sciences), mathematics (the quadrivium : arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music), and metaphysics—, and the practical sciences—ethics, oeconomics (household management), and politics. Avicenna makes a point to say that he studied these subjects all by himself, in this order, at increasing levels of difficulty, and that he achieved proficiency by the time he was eighteen. At about that time he was allowed to visit the library of the Samanid ruler, just mentioned above, where, he says, he “read those books, mastered their teachings, and realized how far each man had advanced in his science” (Gohlman 1974, 36; transl. Gutas 2014a, 18). Shortly thereafter he wrote his first work, Compendium on the Soul (GP 10), dedicated to the ruler in apparent gratitude for the permission to visit the library. His fame grew, and when he was twenty-one he was asked by a neighbor named ʿArūḍī to write a “comprehensive work” on all philosophy, which he did ( Philosophy for ʿArūḍī , GS 2), treating all subjects listed above except mathematics; another neighbor, Baraqī, asked for commentaries on the books of philosophy on all these subjects—essentially the works of Aristotle—and he obliged with a twenty-volume work he called The Available and the Valid (i.e., of Philosophy , GS 10) and a two-volume work on the practical sciences, Piety and Sin (GPP 1). 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.

But history dealt its blows, ending Avicenna’s idyllic existence of secure employment, intellectual renown, and the admiration of his compatriots. In 999 the Turkic Qarakhanids effectively put an end to the Samanids and took over Bukhara. Avicenna, manifestly because of his close affiliation with the ruling dynasty and his high position in the Samanid administration, saw fit to flee Bukhara. In the Autobiography he provides no political context for his decision but merely says, “necessity led me to forsake Bukhara” (Gohlman 1974, 40–41), though the nature of this “necessity” could hardly be mistaken by his contemporaries and even by us. Thus began Avicenna’s lifelong itinerant career and the attendant quest for patronage and employment (Reisman 2013). Initially he moved north to Gurganj in Khwarizm (999?–1012), but eventually he had to leave again and traveled westwards, staying for a while (1012–1014?) first in Jurjan, off the southeastern Caspian, and then going on into the Iranian heartland, in Ray (1014?–1015), in Hamadhan (1015–1024?), and finally in Isfahan (1024?–1037), in the court of ʿAlāʾ-ad-Dawla, the Kakuyid ruler of the area (Gutas 2014b-I, 6–9). Avicenna served the various local rulers in these cities certainly in his dual capacity as physician and political counselor, functions he had assumed already back home, but also as scientist-in-residence. Engaging in science and philosophy during the first three Abbasid centuries (750–1050) in Islam was done mostly under the political patronage of the rulers and the ruling elite who were the sponsors and also among the consumers of the scientific production. It was certainly a matter of prestige for a ruler to be flanked by the top scientists of his day, but patronage of the sciences was also seen, politically more importantly, as legitimizing his right to whatever throne he was occupying. As a result, many a ruler evinced sheer interest in science itself out of a desire to appear knowledgeable and participated in scientific debates, usually conducted in political fora. 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). Science was much more integrally related to the social and political life and discourse during this period, which is also a significant factor in its rapid spread and development in the Islamic world.

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. His productivity never flagged, even during these years that were militarily and politically turbulent. 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. He died in 1037 in Hamadhan and was buried there. A mausoleum in that city today purports to be his.

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. In the Autobiography he says that by the time he was eighteen he had mastered all subjects in philosophy without anything new having come to him since (Gohlman 1974, 30–39). Even though the Autobiography has particular philosophical points to make (discussed in the next section), this is no mere boast. There are reports that he wrote major portions of his greatest work, The Cure , without any books to consult (Gohlman 1974, 58; transl. and analysis Gutas 2014a, 109–115), that he composed in a single night, dusk to dawn, a treatise on logic in one hundred quarto (large size) pages (Gohlman 1974, 76–81), and that he compiled The Salvation (GS 6) “en route”—on horseback, manifestly, or during rests from riding—in the course of a military expedition in which he had accompanied his master, ʿAlāʾ-ad-Dawla (Gohlman 1974, 66–67). Exaggerated and hagiographic as some of these reports might be, it is clear that Avicenna had constructively internalized (not to say “memorized”) the philosophical curriculum and he could reproduce it, properly assimilated and analytically reconstructed, at will. This is also evident in his disregard (rather than neglect?) 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 could write fast and with great precision, sacrificing nothing in analytical depth. At the same time, however, given his undisputed fame and immense intellectual authority that he exercised soon after his death, pseudepigraphy became a major factor multiplying the works attributed to him (Reisman 2004 and 2010). 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). Much work still remains to be done in this regard.

Avicenna wrote in different genres, but his major innovation was the development of the summa philosophiae , a comprehensive work that included all parts of philosophy as classified in the late antique Alexandrian and early Islamic tradition (cited above). This was due as much to his own philosophical training, which followed this curriculum, as to the earliest commissions he received while still in Bukhara for works that would encompass all philosophy; but then these commissions inevitably reflect the broad philosophical culture of the period that viewed science and philosophy as an integral whole. Already in his very first philosophical treatise, Compendium on the Soul , which Avicenna dedicated to the Samanid ruler, as noted above, he presented the theoretical knowledge (the intelligible forms) to be acquired by the rational soul precisely as classified in the philosophical curriculum (Gutas 2014a, 6–8), and with his second work, the Philosophy commissioned by ʿArūḍī, he fleshed out this outline into the first scholastic philosophical compendium or summa. 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. 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:

• Eisagoge (Porphyry’s Eisagoge )
• Categories (Aristotle’s Categories )
• On interpretation (Aristotle’s De interpretatione )
• Syllogism (Aristotle’s Prior Analytics )
• Demonstration (Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics )
• Dialectic (Aristotle’s Topics )
• Sophistics (Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations )
• Rhetoric (Aristotle’s Rhetoric )
• Poetics (Aristotle’s Poetics ).
• On nature (Aristotle’s Physics )
• On the heavens (Aristotle’s De caelo )
• On coming to be and passing away (Aristotle’s De generatione et corruptione )
• Mineralogy (Aristotle’s Meteorology IV)
• Meteorology (Aristotle’s Meteorology I–III)
• On the soul (Aristotle’s De anima )
• Botany ( De plantis by Nicolaus of Damascus)
• Zoology (Aristotle’s History, Parts, and Generation of Animals )
• Geometry (Euclid’s Elements )
• Arithmetic (Nicomachus of Gerasa, Diophantus, Euclid, Thābit b. Qurra, and others)
• Music (mostly Ptolemy’s Harmonics with other material)
• Astronomy (Ptolemy’s Almagest )
• Universal Science: the study of being as being, first philosophy, natural theology (Aristotle’s Metaphysics )
• 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 Oikonomikos and related books by others])
• Ethics (as legislated by a caliph; [Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics ]) [ 4 ]

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. He developed a style of supple Arabic expository prose, complete with technical philosophical terminology, that remained standard thenceforth. After The Cure , he was asked to write a brief exposition of the philosophical subjects, which he did by collecting and putting together—at times even splicing together—material from his earlier writings and produced The Salvation ( al-Najāt ). He did the same, in Persian this time, for his patron the Kakuyid ʿAlāʾ-ad-Dawla, the Philosophy for ʿAlāʾ ( Dāneshnāme-ye ʿAlāʾī , GS 7). In both of these books he left out the mathematical sciences and the subjects of practical philosophy, only the former of which was later supplemented by Jūzjānī, first in Arabic and then in Persian, on the basis of earlier writings by Avicenna.

Toward the end of his life Avicenna wrote two more summae in slightly divergent modes. In one of them, which he called Eastern Philosophy ( al-Mashriqiyyūn or al-Ḥikma al-mashriqiyya , GS 8) to reflect his own locality in the East of the Islamic world, broader Khurasan ( mashriq ), he concentrated on “matters about which researchers have disagreed” in logic, physics, and metaphysics, but not mathematics or the subjects of practical philosophy (except for prophetic legislation which he introduced; see below) insofar as there was little disagreement about them. His approach is doctrinal, not historical, presenting, as he says, “the fundamental elements of true philosophy which was discovered by someone who examined a lot, reflected long,” and had nearly perfect syllogistic prowess, namely, himself (GS 8, p. 2 and 4; transl. and analysis Gutas 2014a, 35–40; Gutas 2000). In the second, also his very last summa, he diverged even more drastically from traditional modes of presentation and developed an allusive and suggestive style which he called “pointers and reminders” ( al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt , GS 9). The purpose in this, for which he borrowed the topos of late antique Aristotelian commentarial tradition explaining why Aristotle had developed a cryptic style of writing, was to train the student by providing not whole arguments and fully articulated theories but only pointers and reminders to them which the student would complete himself. The book, in two parts, deals with logic in the first and with physics, metaphysics, and metaphysics of the rational soul in the second. It proved hugely popular as a succinct though frequently amphibolous statement of his mature philosophy, open to interpretation, and it became the object of repeated commentaries throughout the centuries, apparently as Avicenna must have intended. It is a difficult work, and it must be understood always through constant reference to the more explicit expository statement of Avicenna’s theories in The Cure . Traditionally it has rarely been read except together with a commentary, notably those of Fakhr-ad-Dīn al-Rāzī and especially Naṣīr-ad-Dīn al-Ṭūsī. [ 5 ]

Other than in the summae, Avicenna wrote comprehensively on all philosophy in two major and massive works, both in about twenty volumes, both now lost. The first was his youthful commentary on the works of Aristotle which he wrote upon commission by his neighbor Baraqī, mentioned above, The Available and the Valid [ of Philosophy ]. The second, Fair Judgment (GS 11) , composed in 1029, was a detailed commentary on the “difficult passages” of the entire Aristotelian corpus, in which was included even the suspect Theology of Aristotle (actually Plotinus’ Enneads IV–VI). The title refers to Avicenna’s adjudication between traditional Aristotelian exegeses and Avicenna’s own views by presenting arguments in support of the latter. As Avicenna explains his title, “I divided [in the book] scholars into two groups, the Westerners [the Greek commentarial tradition and the Baghdad Aristotelians] and the Easterners [Avicenna’s positions], and I had the Easterners argue against the Westerners until I intervened to judge fairly when there was a real point of dispute between them” (GS 14, 375; transl. Gutas 2014a, 145). The book was unfortunately lost during some military rout, and only the commentary on Book Lambda, 6–10, of Aristotle’s Metaphysics survives (GS 11a; Geoffroy et al. 2014), along with two incomplete recensions of his commentary on the Theology of Aristotle (GS 11b; Vajda 1951). Some marginal notes on De anima , surviving independently as transcribed in a manuscript, have the same approach and manifestly belong to the same period and project (GS 11c; Gutas 2004b).

Independent treatises on individual subjects written by Avicenna deal with most subjects, but especially with those for which there was greater demand by his sponsors and in which he was particularly interested, notably logic, the soul, and the metaphysics of the rational soul. 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. In addition, he engaged in protracted correspondence with scholars who asked or questioned him about specific problems; noteworthy are his Answers to Questions Posed by Bīrūnī [GP 8], the other scientific genius of his time, on Aristotelian physics and cosmology, and especially the two posthumous compilations of his responses and discussions circulating under the titles Notes (GS 12a) and Discussions (GS 14). He also wrote what amounts to open letters depicting the controversies in which he was involved and seeking arbitration or repudiating calumniatory charges against him (GPW 1–3).

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. He wrote with the purpose of reaching all layers of (literate) society, but also with an eye to posterity. His reach was as global in its aspirations as his system was all-encompassing in its comprehensiveness; and history bore him out.

The Autobiography, written at a time when Avicenna had reached his philosophical maturity, touches upon a number of issues that he felt were highly significant in his formation as a thinker and accordingly point the way to his approach to philosophy and his philosophical aims and orientation. These were, first, his understanding of the structure of philosophical knowledge (all intellectual knowledge, that is) as a unified whole, which is reflected in the classification of the sciences he studied; second, his critical evaluation of all past science and philosophy, as represented in his assessment of the achievements and shortcomings of previous philosophers after he had read their books in the Samanid library, which led to the realization that philosophy must be updated; and third, his emphasis on having been an autodidact points to the human capability of acquiring the highest knowledge rationally by oneself, and leads to a comprehensive study of all functions of the rational soul and how it acquires knowledge (epistemology) as well as to an inquiry into its origins, destination, activities, and their consequences (eschatology). Accordingly Avicenna set himself the task of presenting and writing about philosophy as an integral whole and not piecemeal and occasionalistically; bringing philosophy up to date; and studying how the human soul (intellect) knows as the foundation of his theory of knowledge, logical methodology, and the relation between the celestial and terrestrial realms, or the divine and human.

The implementation of the first task, the treatment of all philosophy as a unified whole, though historically seemingly unachievable, was accomplished by Avicenna almost without effort. Aristotle himself stands at the very beginning of this process. He clearly had a conception of the unity of all philosophy, which could be systematically presented on the basis of the logical structure set forth in the Posterior Analytics (Barnes 1994, p. xii), while his classification of the sciences in Metaphysics E1 and K7 showed what the outline of such a systematic presentation would be. 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. In subsequent centuries, when the polyphony subsided to just two voices, of the Platonists and the Aristotelians, which eventually had to be presented as one for political reasons (to counter the one “divine” voice of the rapidly Christianizing Roman empire, east and west), the tendency to return to the texts of the two masters ( ad fontes ) for their defense, which had started even before the domination of Christianity, intensified. Accordingly, while the classification of the different parts of philosophy continued to be presented as a virtual blueprint for a potential philosophical summa, the main form of philosophical discourse was the individual treatise on one or more of related themes and, predominantly, the commentary on the works of “divine” Plato and, by the sixth century, also “divine” Aristotle. When philosophy was resuscitated after a hiatus of about two centuries (ca. 600–800) with the translation and paraphrase, in Arabic this time, of the canonical source texts (Gutas 2004a), these compositional practices reappeared. But the social context in which philosophy now found itself had changed. The literate population in the Islamic near and farther East during the early Abbasid period was favorably disposed toward philosophy as a rational scientific system, and with the different parts of this system—the philosophical curriculum—broadly known in its range if not in detail, it was possible, indeed expected, that an educated layman like Avicenna’s neighbor in Bukhara, Abū-l-Ḥasan Aḥmad ibn-ʿAbdallāh al-ʿArūḍī (I give his full name because he deserves to be noted in a history of philosophy), would be interested to have and read a comprehensive account of the entire discipline and to commission such a work from the youthful Avicenna. Avicenna complied, and thus was born the first philosophical summa treating in a systematic and consistent fashion within the covers of a single book all the branches of logic and theoretical philosophy as classified in the Aristotelian tradition. That Avicenna was able to produce such a work (and repeat it seven more times thenceforth) is of course a tribute to his genius (universally acknowledged both then and now), but that the request for it should have come from his society is telling evidence of its cultural attitude regarding science.

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. It presented for the first time to the world a comprehensive, unified, and internally self-consistent account of reality, along with the methodological tools wherewith to validate it (logic)—it presented a scientific system as a worldview, difficult to resist or even refute, given its self-validating properties. This was good for studying philosophy and disseminating it. But by the same token, and by its very nature, this worldview so clearly presented, documented, and validated, set itself up against other ideologies in the society with contending worldviews. Up until that time, philosophical treatises on discrete subjects and abstruse commentaries, the two dominant forms of philosophical discourse, as just indicated, were matters for specialists that could not and did not claim endorsement or allegiance from society as a whole; the philosophical summa did. And Avicenna who wrote in different styles and genres to reach as many people as possible, as also noted above, clearly intended as much. As a result, his philosophical system dominated intellectual history in both Shi’ite and most of Sunni Islam (Gutas 2002), and through the sundry reactions it elicited, it determined, and can now explain, developments not only in philosophy but also in theology and mysticism, and it generated several fields of what can be called para-philosophy: [ 6 ] theology using philosophical discourse to express (or hide) Islamic content (the tradition of al-Ghazālī and his followers and imitators), “philosophical” mysticism (the tradition of Ibn al-ʿArabī, who was called the Greatest Master” [ al-Shaykh al-Akbar ] to rival Avicenna’s “The Preeminent Master” [ al-Shaykh al-Raʾīs ]), occultism, numerology, lettrism.

Performance of the first task, necessarily entailed the second, bringing philosophy up to date. The philosophical knowledge that Avicenna received was neither complete nor homogeneous. He had no access to the entirety of even the very lacunose information that we now have about the philosophical movements during the 1330 years separating him from Aristotle (Avicenna gives this quite accurate number himself), but could view the entire tradition as essentially Aristotelian. Plato was not available in Arabic other than in brief excerpts, in Galen’s epitomes, in gnomologies, and in second-hand reports in Aristotle and Galen (Gutas 2012a), and accordingly Avicenna could dismiss him. The lesser philosophical schools of antiquity—the Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics, and Pythagoreans, who had ceased to exist long before late antiquity—he knew mostly as names with certain basic views or sayings affiliated with them. Those whom we call Neoplatonists he knew as commentators of Aristotle along with the rest, and even Plotinus and Proclus were available to him in translated excerpts under the name of Aristotle, as the Theology of Aristotle and The Pure Good respectively. However, both the substantive and temporal diversity of these sources in the tradition presented grave inconsistencies and divergent tendencies, to say nothing of anachronisms, while the surviving work even of Aristotle himself contained discrepancies and incomplete treatments. Furthermore, the Islamic tradition before Avicenna was not any less unhomogeneous, as it was represented by the eclectic al-Kindī and his disciples, the Aristotelians of Baghdad, and the sui generis Rhazes (of whom Avicenna thought little even as a physician). 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). 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. An area that needed to be added most urgently in both the theoretical and practical parts of philosophy, if all reality was to be covered by his system, was all manifestations of religious life and paranormal events. 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. Gutas 2014a, 36).

Performance of this second task, in turn, entailed the third, the accuracy and verifiability of the knowledge which would constitute the contents of his updated philosophy. 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. The method Avicenna adopted already at the start of his career was logic, and the mental apparatus wherewith we know involved an understanding and study of the human, rational soul. Thus logic and the theory of the soul as the basis for epistemology are the two motors driving Avicenna’s philosophy. He wrote more, and more frequently, on these two subjects than on anything else.

The starting point of Avicenna’s logic is that all knowledge is either forming concepts ( taṣawwur ) by means of definitions—i.e. in good Aristotelian fashion, realizing the genus and specific difference of something—or acknowledging the truth ( taṣdīq ) of a categorical statement by means of syllogisms. The inspiration here is clearly the beginning of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (cf. Lameer 2006). Avicenna took this book seriously, following both the curriculum, in which this book was made the center of logical practice, and especially his two Peripatetic predecessors in Baghdad, Abū-Bishr Mattā and al-Fārābī, who made it the cornerstone of their philosophy and advertised its virtues (cf. Marmura 1990).

Acknowledging the truth of a categorical statement meant verifying it, and this could only be done by taking that statement as the conclusion of a syllogism and then constructing the syllogism that would conclude it. There being three terms in a syllogism, two of which, the minor and the major, are present in the conclusion, the syllogism that leads to that conclusion can be constructed only if one figures out or guesses correctly what the middle term is that explains the connection between the two extreme terms. 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.). Avicenna picked up on the very concept of the talent for hitting upon the middle term, literally translated in the Arabic version as ḥads (guessing correctly, hitting correctly upon the answer), and made it the cornerstone of his epistemology (Gutas 2001). 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.

In essence, following this method of logical verification meant for Avicenna examining the texts of Aristotle, read in the order in which they are presented in the curriculum, and testing the validity of every paragraph. How he did this in practice, teasing out the figures and forms of syllogisms implied in Aristotle’s texts, can be seen in numerous passages in his works. By his eighteenth year, he had internalized the philosophical curriculum and verified it to his own satisfaction as a coherent system with a logical structure that explains all reality.

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. Avicenna’s identification of hitting upon the middle term as the central element in logical analysis on the one hand established that the syllogistic structure of all knowledge is also as it is thought by the celestial intellects, and on the other enabled Avicenna to unify and integrate the different levels of its acquisition by the human intellect within a single explanatory model. As a result, he succeeded in de-mystifying concepts like inspiration, enthusiasm, mystical vision, and prophetic revelation, explaining all as natural functions of the rational soul. 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). At a higher level, Avicenna analyzed non-discursive thinking, which takes no time and grasps its object in a single act of intellection, though the knowledge acquired is still structured syllogistically, complete with middle terms (because in its locus, the active intellect, it is so structured) (Adamson 2004). Avicenna also discussed a facility for or habituation with intellection, which he called direct vision or experience ( mushāhada ) of the intelligibles. 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). The highest level of intellection is that of the prophet, who, on account of his supremely developed ability to hit upon middle terms, acquires the intelligibles “either at once or nearly so … in an order which includes the middle terms” (GS 6, 273–274; transl. Gutas 2014a, 184).

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. with philosophy, or more specifically, with the philosophical sciences as classified and taught in the Aristotelian tradition. However, the identity between absolute knowledge, in the form of the intelligibles contained in the intellects of the celestial spheres, and philosophy, as recorded in the Aristotelian tradition, is not complete. Though Aristotelianism is the philosophical tradition most worthy of adherence, Avicenna says, it is nevertheless not perfect, and it is the task of philosophers to correct and amplify it through the acquisition of further intelligibles by syllogistic processes. 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. For although the knowledge to be acquired, in itself and on the transcendent plane of the eternal celestial intellects, is a closed system and hence static, on a human level and in history it is evolutionary. 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. Avicenna was conscious of having attained a new level in the pursuit of philosophical truth and its verification, but he never claimed to have exhausted it all; in his later works he bemoaned the limitations of human knowledge and urged his readers to continue with the task of improving philosophy and adding to the store of knowledge.

The human intellect can engage in a syllogistic process in the order which includes the middle terms and which is identical with that of the celestial intellects for the simple reason, as Avicenna repeatedly insists, that both human and celestial intellects are congeneric ( mujānis ), immaterial substances. However, their respective acquisition of knowledge is different because of their different circumstances: the human intellect comes into being in an absolutely potential state and needs its association with the perishable body in order to actualize itself, whereas the celestial intellects are related to eternal bodies and are permanently actual. Thus unfettered, their knowledge can be completely intellective because they perceive and know the intelligibles from what causes them, while the human intellect is in need of the corporeal senses, both external and internal, in order to perceive the effect of an intelligible from which it can reason syllogistically back to its cause. This makes it necessary for Avicenna to have an empirical theory of knowledge, according to which “the senses are the means by which the human soul acquires different kinds of knowledge ( maʿārif ),” and man’s predisposition for the primary notions and principles of knowledge, which come to him unawares, is itself actualized by the experience of particulars (GS 12a, 23; transl. and analysis in Gutas 2014b-VII, esp. pp. 25–27). For human knowledge, therefore, the intellect functions as a processor of the information provided by the external and internal senses. 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. Instead, it must proceed to them from their perceived effects. However, once the soul has been freed of the body after death, and if, while still with the body, it has acquired the predisposition to perceive the intelligibles through philosophical training, then it can behold the intelligibles through their causes and become just like the celestial spheres, a state which Avicenna describes as happiness in philosophical terms and paradise in religious.

Avicenna’s rationalist empiricism is the main reason why he strove in his philosophy on the one hand to perfect and fine-tune logical method and on the other to study, at an unprecedented level of sophistication and precision, the human (rational) soul and cognitive processes which provide knowledge through the application of rational empirical methods. In section after section and chapter after chapter in numerous works he analyzes not only questions of formal logic but also the mechanics through which the rational soul acquires knowledge, and in particular the conditions operative in the process of hitting upon the middle term: how one can work for it and where to look for it, and what the apparatus and operations of the soul are that bring it about (Gutas 2001). This entailed detailed study of the operations of the soul in its totality and in all its functions, whether rational, animal, or vegetative. He charts in great detail the operations of all the senses, both the five external senses and especially the five internal senses located in the brain—common sense, imagery (where the forms of things are stored), imagination, estimation (judging the imperceptible significance or connotations for us of sensed objects, like friendship and enmity, which also includes instinctive sensing), and memory—and how they can help or hinder the intellect in hitting upon the middle term and perceiving intelligibles more generally. When, at the end of all these operations just described, the intellect hits upon a middle term or just perceives an intelligible that it had not been thinking about before, it acquires the intelligible in question (hence the appellation of this stage of intellection, “acquired intellect,” al-ʿaql al-mustafād ), or, otherwise expressed, acquires it from the active intellect which thinks it eternally and atemporally since the active intellect is, in effect, the locus of all intelligibles, there being no other place for them to be always in actual existence. The human intellect can think an intelligible for some time, but then it disappears, it being impossible for the immaterial intellect to “store” it, or have memory of it, as opposed to the two internal senses, imagery and memory, which have a storage function for their particular oblects (forms and connotational attributes) because they have a material base in the brain. Avicenna calls this process of acquisition or apprehension of the intelligibles a “contact” ( ittiṣāl ) between the human and active intellects. [ 7 ] In the emanative language which he inherited from the Neoplatonic tradition, and which he incorporated in his own understanding of the cosmology of the concentric spheres of the universe with their intercommunicating intellects and souls, he referred to the flow of knowledge from the supernal world to the human intellect as “divine effluence” ( al-fayḍ al-ilāhī ). The reason that this is possible at all is again the consubstantiality and congeneric nature of all intellects, human and celestial alike. Only, as already mentioned, because of their varied circumstances, the latter think of the intelligibles directly, permanently, and atemporally, while the human intellect has to advance from potentiality to actuality in time by technical means leading to the discovery of the middle term as it is assisted by all the other faculties of the soul and body.

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. But this is groundless; the “flow” has nothing mystical about it; it just means that the intelligibles are permanently available to human intellects who seek a middle term or other intelligibles at the end of a thinking process by means of abstraction and syllogisms. Avicenna is quite explicit about the need for the human intellect to be prepared and to demand to hit upon a middle term, or actively to seek an intelligible, in order to receive it. He says specifically, “The active principle [i.e. the active intellect] lets flow upon the [human rational] soul form after form in accordance with the demand by the soul ; and when the soul turns away from it [the active intellect], then the effluence is broken off” (GS 5, De anima, 245–246; transl. Gutas 2014a, 377; cf. Hasse 2013, 118).

The same applies to other forms of communication from the supernal world. In the case of the prophet, he acquires all the intelligibles comprising knowledge, complete with middle terms as already mentioned, because the intellective capacity of his rational soul to hit upon the middle terms and acquire the intelligibles is extraordinarily high; this capacity is coupled with an equally highly developed internal sense of imagination that can translate this intellective knowledge into language and images (in the form of a revealed book) that the vast majority of humans can easily understand. But in addition to intelligible knowledge, the divine effluence from the intellects and the souls of the celestial spheres also includes information about events on earth, past, present, and future—what Avicenna calls “the unseen” ( al-ghayb )—, for all of which the intellects and souls of the celestial spheres are directly responsible. This information can also be received by humans in various forms—as waking or sleeping dreams, as visions, as messages to soothsayers—depending on the level of the humoral equilibrium of the recipient, the proper functioning of his internal and external senses, and the readiness of his intellect. Somebody whose internal sense of imagination or estimation is overactive, for example, may be hindered thereby in the clear reception of dream images so that his dreams would require interpretation, while someone else not so afflicted may get clearer messages; or a soothsayer who wishes to receive information about the future has to run long and hard in order to bring about such a humoral equilibrium through the exertion, thereby preparing his intellect to receive the message.

The logistics of the reception of information from the supernal world thus varies in accordance with what is being communicated and who is receiving it, but in all cases the recipient has to be ready and predisposed to receive it. All humans have both the physical and mental apparatus to acquire intelligible and supernal knowledge and the means to do so, but they have to work for it, just as they have to prepare for their bliss in afterlife while their immortal rational souls are still affiliated with the body. There is no free emanation of the intelligibles on “couch-potato” humans, or afterlife contemplation for them of eternal realities in the company of the celestial spheres (Avicenna’s paradise). To have thought so would have negated the entire philosophical project Avicenna so painstakingly constructed.

This analysis and understanding of the rational soul, precisely elaborated on the basis of the Aristotelian theory but also going much beyond it, enable Avicenna to engage systematically primarily with all aspects of religion, cognitive and social alike, and secondarily with what we would call paranormal phenomena (prognostication of the future, telekinesis, evil eye, etc.). All issues relating to the cognitive side of religion he added to the traditional contents of metaphysics, and those relating to the social side he added to the practical sciences. In the former case he created a veritable metaphysics of the rational soul (Gutas 2012b), which he added to the traditional treatment of metaphysics (being as such, first philosophy, natural theology) as an additional subject, called “theological” ( al-ʿilm al-ilāhī, al-ṣināʿa al-ilāhiyya ). Its contents can be seen in his extensive treatment of it all at the end of the metaphysics part of The Cure , as follows.

Book 9, Chapter 7: Destination of the rational soul in the afterlife and its bliss and misery; real happiness is the perfection of the rational soul through knowledge.

Book 10, Chapter 1: Celestial effects on the world: inspiration, dreams, prayer, celestial punishment, prophecy, astrology.

On the social side of religion, he added a fourth subdivision to practical philosophy (in addition to ethics, household management, and politics) which he called “the discipline of legislating” ( al-ṣināʿa al-shāriʿa, Kaya 2012; Kaya 2014; Gutas 2014a, 470–471, 497). As mentioned above, the prophet, through his supremely developed ability to hit upon the middle of terms of syllogisms, acquires all knowledge (all the intelligibles actually thought by the active intellect) “either at once or nearly so.” This acquisition “is not an uncritical reception [of this knowledge] merely on authority, but rather occurs in an order which includes the middle terms: for beliefs accepted on authority concerning those things which are known only through their causes possess no intellectual certainty” (GS 5, De anima, 249–250; transl. Gutas 2014a, 183–184). With this secure and syllogistically verified knowledge, the prophet then is in a position to legislate and regulate social life as well as have a legitimate ground for gaining consent. The subjects of all parts of practical philosophy are covered briefly also at the very end of The Cure , as follows:

Book 10, Chapter 2: Proof of prophecy on the basis of the need for laws, to be enacted by the prophet legislator, in order to regulate social life which is necessary for human survival.

Chapter 3: Acts of worship as reminders of the afterlife and as exercises predisposing the rational soul to engage in intellection (cf. Gutas 2014a, 206–208).

Chapter 4: Household management.

Chapter 5: Politics (the caliphate and legislation); ethics.

For further reading, see the entries on Ibn Sina’s metaphysics and Ibn Sina’s natural philosophy .

Avicenna synthesized the various strands of philosophical thought he inherited—the surviving Hellenic traditions along with the developments in philosophy and theology within Islam—into a self-consistent scientific system that explained all reality. His scientific edifice rested on Aristotelian physics and metaphysics capped with Neoplatonic emanationism in the context of Ptolemaic cosmology, all revised, re-thought, and critically re-assessed by him. His achievement consisted in his harmonization of the disparate parts into a rational whole, and particularly in bringing the sublunar and supralunar worlds into an intelligible relation for which he argued logically. The system was therefore both a research program and a worldview.

Aristotelian ethics provided the foundation of the edifice. The imperative to know, and to know rationally, which is the motivation behind Avicenna’s conception and then realization of his scientific system, is based on Aristotle’s concept of happiness as the activity of that which differentiates humans from all other organic life, of the mind ( Nicomachean Ethics X.7, 1177b19–25): “the activity of the intellect is thought to be distinguished by hard work ( spoudê, ijtihād ), since it employs theory, and it does not desire to have any other end at all except itself; and it has its proper pleasure …. Complete happiness ( eudaimonia, saʿāda ) is this.” [ 8 ] Avicenna subscribed fully to this view of human happiness in this world, and extended it to make it also the basis for happiness in the next—as a matter of fact, he made it a prerequisite for happiness in the next. Only the contemplative life while in the body prepares the intellect, which has to use the corporeal external and internal senses to acquire knowledge and gain the predisposition for thinking the intelligibles, for the contemplative life after death. In understanding the goal of human life in this manner Avicenna was again being true to the Aristotelian view of divine happiness as the identity of thinker, thinking, and thought ( Metaphysics XII.7, 1072b18–26). Using the words of Aristotle, Avicenna paraphrases this passage as follows: “As for the foremost ‘understanding ( noêsis, fahm ) in itself, it is of what is best in itself;’ and as for ‘what understands itself, it is’ the substance ‘of the intellect as it acquires the intelligible, because it becomes intelligible’ right away just as if ‘it touches it,’ for example. ‘And the intellect,’ that which intellects, ‘and the intelligible are one and the same’ with regard to the essence of the thing as it relates to itself…. ‘And if the deity<’s state> is always like the state in which we sometimes are, then this is marvelous; and if it is more, then it is even more marvelous’” (Geoffroy et al. 2014, 59). [ 9 ]

There is thus a deeply ethical aspect to Avicenna’s philosophical system. The core conception was the life of the rational soul: because our theoretical intellects—our selves—are consubstantial with the celestial intellects, it is our cosmic duty to enable our intellects to reach their full potential and behave like the celestial ones, that is, think the intelligibles (cf. Lizzini 2009). And because we (i.e. our essential core which identifies us and survives, our rational souls) are given a body and our materiality hampers our unencumbered intellection like that enjoyed by the First and the other celestial beings, we have to tend to the body by all means, behavioral (religious practices, ethical conduct) and pharmacological, to bring its humoral temperament to a level of equilibrium that will help the function of the intellect in this life and prepare it for unimpeded and continuous intellection, like that of the deity, in the next. This is humanist ethics dictated by a scientific view of the world.

Apart from the references in the text, the bibliography also lists several recent studies on Avicenna along with some reference works. For a full list of Avicenna’s works in Arabic and Persian, their editions, translations, and studies, see the inventory in Gutas 2014a, also for further bibliography.

• Adamson, P., 2004, “Non-Discursive Thought in Avicenna’s Commentary on the Theology of Aristotle,” in Interpreting Avicenna: Science and Philosophy in Medieval Islam , J. McGinnis (ed.), Leiden: Brill, pp. 87–111.
• –––, (ed.), 2013, Interpreting Avicenna. Critical Essays , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Akasoy, A., and A. Fidora, 2005, The Arabic Version of the Nicomachean Ethics, Leiden: Brill.
• Badawī, ʿA., 1947, Arisṭū ʿinda l-ʿArab , Cairo: Maktabat an-nahḍa al-miṣriyya.
• Barnes, J., 1994, Aristotle. Posterior Analytics , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Bertolacci, A., 2006, The Reception of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Šifāʾ, Leiden: Brill.
• Biesterfeldt, H.H., 2000. “Medieval Arabic Encyclopedias of Science and Philosophy,” in The Medieval Hebrew Encyclopedias of Science and Philosophy , S. Harvey (ed.), Boston: Kluwer, pp. 77–98.
• –––, 2002, “Arabisch-islamische Enzyklopädien: Formen und Funktionen,” in Die Enzyklopädie im Mittelalter vom Hochmittelalter bis zur frühen Neuzeit , Ch. Meier (ed.), München: Wilhelm Fink, pp. 43–83.
• Black, D., 2008, “Avicenna on Self-Awareness and Knowing that One Knows,” in The Unity of Science in the Arabic Tradition , S. Rahman, T. Street, and H. Tahiri (eds.), N.p.: Springer, pp. 63–87.
• Davidson, H.A., 1987, Proofs for Eternity, Creation and the Existence of God in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1992, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect , Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
• Eichner, H., 2009, The Post-Avicennian Philosophical Tradition and Islamic Orthodoxy: Philosophical and Theological Summae in Context , unpublished professorial dissertation (Habilitationsschrift), Halle.
• Geoffroy et al., 2014, Commentaire sur le Livre Lambda de la Métaphysique d’Aristote (Chapitres 6–10) par Ibn Sīnā (Avicenne) , M. Geoffroy, J. Janssens, and M. Sebti (eds.), Paris: Vrin.
• Gohlman, W.E., 1974, The Life of Ibn Sina , Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
• Goichon, A.-M., 1938, Lexique de la langue philosophique d’Ibn Sīnā , Paris: Desclée de Brouwer.
• –––, 1939, Vocabulaires comparés d’Aristote et d’Ibn Sīnā , Paris: Desclée de Brouwer.
• –––, 1951, Ibn Sīnā (Avicenne). Livre des directives et remarques , Paris: Vrin
• –––, 1959, Le récit de Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān commenté par des textes d’Avicenne . Paris: Desclée de Brouwer.
• Gutas, D., 1987–88, “Avicenna’s Maḏhab , With an Appendix on the Question of His Date of Birth,” Quaderni di Studi Arabi , 5–6: 323–36; repr. in Gutas 2014b-II.
• –––, 1998, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture , London and New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2000, “Avicenna’s Eastern (“Oriental”) Philosophy: Nature, Contents, Transmission,” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 10: 159‑180.
• –––, 2001, “Intuition and Thinking: The Evolving Structure of Avicenna’s Epistemology,” Princeton Papers. Interdisciplinary Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 9: 1‑38; repr. in Aspects of Avicenna, R. Wisnovsky (ed.), Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2001, pp. 1‑38.
• –––, 2002, “The Heritage of Avicenna: The Golden Age of Arabic Philosophy, 1000 ‑ ca. 1350,” in Janssens and De Smet 2002: 81–97.
• –––, 2004a. “Geometry and the Rebirth of Philosophy in Arabic with al‑Kindī,” in Words, Texts and Concepts Cruising the Mediterranean Sea, Studies … Dedicated to Gerhard Endress on his Sixty‑fifth Birthday , ed. R. Arnzen and J. Thielmann, 195–209. Leuven: Peeters.
• –––, 2004b, “Avicenna’s Marginal Glosses on De anima and the Greek Commentatorial Tradition,” in Philosophy Science & Exegesis in Greek, Arabic & Latin Commentaries , ed. P. Adamson, H. Baltussen, and M.W.F. Stone, II,77–88, London: Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 83.2.
• –––, 2006a, “Intellect Without Limits: The Absence of Mysticism in Avicenna,” in Intellect et imagination dans la Philosophie Médiévale ( Actes du XI e Congrès International de Philosophie Médiévale de la S.I.E.P.M. , Porto, du 26 au 31 août 2002) , M. C. Pacheco and J.F. Meirinhos (eds.), Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 351–372; repr. in Gutas 2014b, article XII.
• –––, 2006b, “Imagination and Transcendental Knowledge in Avicenna,” in Arabic Theology, Arabic Philosophy. From the Many to the One: Essays in Celebration of Richard M. Frank , J.E. Montgomery (ed.,), Leuven: Peters, pp. 337–354; repr. in Gutas 2014b, article XI.
• –––, 2010, “Origins in Baghdad,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy , R. Pasnau (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 11–25
• –––, 2012a, “Platon. Tradition Arabe,” in Dictionnaire des Philosophes Antiques , R. Goulet (ed.), Paris: CNRS.
• –––, 2012b, “Avicenna: The Metaphysics of the Rational Soul,” Muslim World , 102: 417–425.
• –––, 2014a, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition. Inroduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works. Second, Revised and Enlarged Edition , Leiden: E.J. Brill.
• –––, 2014b, Orientations of Avicenna’s Philosophy , Ashgate/Variorum: Surrey/Burlington.
• –––, 2014b-I, “Avicenna: Biography,” in Gutas 2014b, article I.
• –––, 2014b-VII, “The Empiricism of Avicenna,” in Gutas 2014b, article VII.
• –––, 2015, “The Author as Pioneer[ing Genius]: Graeco-Arabic Philosophical Autobiographies and the Paradigmatic Ego,” in Concepts of Authorship in Pre-Modern Arabic Texts , L. Behzadi and J. Hameen-Anttila (eds.), Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press, pp. 47–62
• Hasse, D.N., 2013, “Avicenna’s Epistemological Optimism,” in Adamson 2013, pp. 109–119.
• Hasse, D.N., and A. Bertolacci (eds.), 2012, The Arabic, Hebrew and Latin Reception of Avicenna’s Metaphysics [Scientia Graeco-Arabica 7], Berlin: De Gruyter.
• Heath, P., 1990, “Disorientation and Reorientation in Ibn Sina’s Epistle of the Bird: A Reading ,” in Intellectual Studies on Islam. Essays written in honor of Martin B. Dickson , Michel M. Mazzaoui and Vera B. Moreen, eds., Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press, pp. 163–183.
• Inati, S.C., 1984, Ibn Sīnā , Remarks and Admonitions. Part One: Logic ,Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.
• –––, 1996, Ibn Sīnā and Mysticism. Remarks and Admonitions: Part Four , London and New York: Kegan Paul International.
• –––, 2014, Ibn Sina’s Remarks and Admonitions: Physics and Metaphysics, New York: Columbia University Press.
• Janssens, J., 1991, An Annotated Bibliography on Ibn Sînâ (1970–1989) , Leuven: Leuven University Press.
• –––, 1999, An Annotated Bibliography on Ibn Sīnā: First Supplement (1990–1994) , Louvain-la-Neuve: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales.
• –––, 2006, Ibn Sīnā and His Influence on the Arabic and Latin World [Variorum Collected Studies 843], Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate.
• Janssens, J., and D. De Smet (eds.), 2002, Avicenna and His Heritage , Leuven: Leuven University Press.
• Kaya, M.C., 2012, “Prophetic Legislation: Avicenna’s View of Practical Philosophy Revisited,” in Philosophy and the Abrahamic Religions: Scriptural Hermeneutics and Epistemology , T. Kirby, R. Acar, and B. Baş, eds., Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 205–223.
• –––, 2014, “In the Shadow of “Prophetic Legislation”: The Venture of Practical Philosophy after Avicenna,” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 24: 269–296.
• Lameer, J., 2006, Conception and Belief in Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī (ca 1571–1635 ), Tehran: Iranian Institute of Philosophy.
• Langermann, T., 2009, Avicenna and His Legacy. A Golden Age of Science and Philosophy , Turnhout: Brepols.
• Lizzini, O., 2009, “Vie active, vie contemplative et philosophie chez Avicenne,” in Vie active et vie contemplative au Moyen Âge et au seuil de la Renaissance , Ch. Trottmann (ed.), Rome: École Française de Rome, pp. 207–239.
• Mahdavī, Y., 1954, Fehrest-e nosḫahā-ye moṣannafāt-e Ebn-e Sīnā , Tehran: Dānešgāh-e Tehrān, 1333Š.
• Marmura, M.E., 1990, “The Fortuna of the Posterior Analytics in the Arabic Middle Ages,” in Knowledge and the Sciences in Medieval Philosophy , M. Asztalos, J.E. Murdoch, I. Niiniluoto (eds.), Helsinki: Acta Philosophica Fennica, v. I, pp. 85–103; repr. in Marmura 2005: 355–373.
• –––, 2005, Probing in Islamic Philosophy , Binghamton, N.Y.: Global Academic Publishing.
• McGinnis, J., with the assistance of D.C. Reisman, 2004, Interpreting Avicenna : Science and Philosophy in Medieval Islam , Leiden: Brill.
• McGinnis, J., 2010, Avicenna , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Michot, Yahya (Jean R.), 1986, La destinée de l’homme selon Avicenne. Le retour à Dieu (ma‘ād) et l’imagination , Leuven: Peeters.
• –––, 2000, Ibn Sînâ. Lettre au vizir Abû Sa‘d. Editio princeps d’après le manuscrit de Bursa, traduction de l’arabe, introduction, notes et lexique [Sagesses musulmanes 4] , Beirut/Paris: Al-Bouraq.
• Rahman, F., 1958, Prophecy in Islam , London : George Allen & Unwin; repr. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011.
• Reisman, D.C., 2002, The Making of the Avicennan Tradition: The Transmission, Contents, and Structure of Ibn Sīnā’s al-Mubāḥaṯāt (The Discussions), Leiden: Brill.
• –––, 2004, “The Pseudo-Avicennan Corpus, I: Methodological Considerations,” in McGinnis with Reisman 2004, pp. 3–21.
• –––, 2010, “The Ps.-Avicenna Corpus II: The Ṣūfistic Turn,” in Documenti e Studi sulla Tradizione Filosofica Medievale ,” 21: 243–258.
• –––, 2013, “The Life and Times of Avicenna. Patronage and Learning in Medieval Islam,” in Adamson 2013, pp. 7–27.
• Swain, S., 2013, Economy, Family, and Society from Rome to Islam , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Treiger, A. 2011. Inspired Knowledge in Islamic Thought. Al-Ghazālī’s Theory of Mystical Cognition and Its Avicennian Foundation . London: Routledge.
• Vajda, G., 1951, “Les notes d’Avicenne sur la «Théologie d’Aristote»,” Revue Thomiste 51: 346–406.
• Wisnovsky, R, 2003, Avicenna’s Metaphysics in Context , Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and methodological topics in: Greek sources | Ibn Sina [Avicenna]: logic | Ibn Sina [Avicenna]: metaphysics | Ibn Sina [Avicenna]: natural philosophy

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Islamic Philosophy Online

PHILOSOPHIA ISLAMICA

Ibn Sina (Avicenna)

Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (980-1037) is one of the foremost philosophers of the golden age of Islamic tradition that also includes  al-Farabi  and  Ibn Rushd . He is also known as al-Sheikh al-Rais (Leader among the wise men) a title that was given to him by his students. His philosophical works were one of the main targets of  al-Ghazali ’s attack on philosophical influences in Islam. In the west he is also known as the “Prince of Physicians” for his famous medical text al-Qanun “Canon”. In Latin translations, his works influenced many Christian philosophers, most notably  Thomas Aquinas . 

CORPUS (WORKS):

In Original Language (Arabic/Persian):

• Autobiography  in Arabic Html
• Biography  by his student in Arabic word file. 
• Biography  from Uyun al’anba fi tabaqat al-‘atibia’ by Ibn ‘abi asaiba’ (Arabic word file)
•   Volume 1: Logic  (PDF, file size: 25000 kb)
•   Volume 2: Physics  (PDF, file size: 13100 kb)
•    Volume 3: Metaphysics  (PDF, file size: 8400 kb)
•   Volume 4: Sufism  (PDF, file size: 4601 kb)
• Somewhat edited e-text in word format . (1.2 megs) with hyperlinked table of contents
• Somewhat edited e-text in html format.   (6.5 megs) with hyperlinked table of contents.
• Kitab al-mabda’ wa l-ma’ad  (PDF, File size TBD Kb)
• Minor editing of e-text in  word format . (from warraq) (1.2)
• Ilhyat  in Arabic html format . (5.4 Megs) big file -with table of contents.
• Part 2:  Psychology (Tabiyat: ilm an-Nafs)  ed. Jan Bakos (PDF, file size: 18304kb) (link)
•  Part 3: Logic madkhal – maqulat – maqiyas ( Zipped  in 3 Arabic word files) A gift from Mufid Dankali. 
• Canon of Medicine (al-Qanun fi al-tibb) . (link to complete 1593 edition) thanks to B. Ludvigsen & AUB.
• Kitab al-Hudud (livre des définitions) (Arabic-French) ed. (A. M. Goichon)  (PDF, file size: 2624kb)
• Uyun al-Hikmah: e-text in  word format . (from warraq)
• Risala fi’l ‘ashq  (Treatise on Love) Trans. E. Fackenheim . (PDF, file size: 1919kb) also available in  word file . 
• al-Mubhathat  (discussions) from Aristu inda’ al-Arab (Aristotle According to Arabs) edited by A. Badawi. (Arabic PDF 10200 kb)
• Ibn Sînâ. Lettre au vizir Abû Sa‘d. Editio princeps d’après le manuscrit de Bursa, traduction de l’arabe, introduction, notes et lexique, « Sagesses Musulmanes, 4 », Paris, Albouraq, 1421/2000, XII, 130*, 61, 4 et 186 p. ISBN 2-84161-150-7.
• IBN SINA – Ḥayy ibn yaqẓān [Mehren, 1889 edition]
• IBN SINA – Isharāt and ṭayr [Mehren, 1891 edition]
• IBN SINA – Kitab al-ʿarshiya [pdf]
• IBN SINA – Qaṣidat al-nafs [pdf]
• IBN SINA – Traité ur le destin [Mehren 1899 edition]
• IBN SINA – Traités mystiques [Mehren 1894 edition]

Attributed works (Questionably by Ibn Sina):

• Risala fi al-Huzn  (from a rare Persian manuscript) (Arabic PDF, file size: 78kb)
• French Translation . (French PDF, file size: 27.2 Megs) 4 volumes.

In English & other languages:

• Medieval Sourcebook:  Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (973-1037): On Medicine  ( link)
• Overview of Shifa. (link)
• Kitab al-mabda’ wa l-ma’ad  (Annotated “exploratory” French Translation by Prof. Y. Michot.) (PDF, File size 427 Kb)
• Remarks and Admonitions Part One: On Logic (Vol. 1 Ishart & Tanbihat)  Tr. S. Inati (PDF, file size: 5585kb)
• Ibn Sina & Mysticism (Vol. 4 Ishart & Tanbihat)  Tr. S. Inati (PDF, file size: 4591kb) 
• Danish Nameh Alali  (Book of knowledge dedicated to Alai Dawlah) (Logic) pdf link.

Bibliography:

• Mu’allfat Ibn Sina (Works of Ibn Sina)  By: G. C. Anawati. (Arabic PDF 12701 kb)
• AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY ON IBN SINA  (1970-1989) by: J. Janssens. (link: book Abstract.)
• There is also a  supplement  to the above. (link)

WORKS ON IBN SINA:

• The inquiry of Avicenna concerning the corporal form  by  L. Khayrallah . Arabic word file.
• Ibn Sina and dental care (link: in Arabic). This site has a lot on the Medical theories of Ibn Sina.
• Childcare according to Ibn Sina  (link: in Arabic).
• Cosmetics in the Canon  (link: in Arabic).
• The distinction between existence and essence in the philosophy of Avicenna . by  L. Khayrallah . Arabic word file.
• Explications de quelques arguments avicenniens contre la théorie des parties insécables.  by  L. Khayrallah . Arabic word file.
• Avicenna, Jon McGinnis, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, ISBN: 9780195331486.
• Avicenna and His Legacy, Y. Tzvi Langermann, ed. Turnhout: Berpols, 2009, ISBN: 9782503527536.
• A New Standard for Avicenna Studies . By D. Reisman (PDF) 3.5 megs.
• Avicenna His life and works . By S. Afnan. pdf format.
• Biography from History of Muslim Philosophy . (pdf) by Prof. F. Rahman
• Biography and works  from the Encyclopedia Iranica. ( www.iranica.com ) (pdf) 4.2 megs.
• Biography & Works  from Encyclopedia of Islam…(e-text)
• Biography & Works  from Encyclopedia of Religion…(PDF e-text). (File Size: 498 KB) 
• Biography & works  from Routledge…(e-text)
• Avicenna on Casual Priority . M. Marmura.  (PDF, file size: 543 KB)
• Avicenna on Theology  A. J. Arberry. (pdf -link)
• Avicenna’s Chapter on the Relative in the Metaphysics of the Shifa . M. Marmura.  (PDF, file size: 554 KB)  
• Ibn Sina’s `Burhan Al-Siddiqin’  -Journal of Islamic Studies. Vol. 12, # 1. Jan. 2001. pp.18-39. pdf. (pdf -link complete e-text) By: T. Mayer
• La distinction de l’existence et de l’essence dans la philosophie d’Avicenna . Par:  L. Khayrallah . (French- word file)
• Ibn-Sina on the human soul, in Notes and observations on natural science, Book II, Section 5. By J. Kenny O. P. (link)
• God Physics: From Hawkings to Avicenna . By: W. Carroll (e-text in word only 82KB)
• An article about  the Danesh Nameh translated  from Russian. PDF. 
• Ibn Sina from: “ A Medical History of Persia and the Eastern Caliphate ” by C. Elgood. (link)
• An Evaluation of Ibn Sina’s Argument for God’s Existence in the Metaphysics of the Isharat, By: T. Mayer (link -Abstract only).
• Nader El-Bizri’s interpretation  of Ibn Sina: (link -Book Abstract).
• International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine . (link)
• AVICENNA AND HIS HERITAGE  Edited by J. JANSSENS and D. DE SMET (link) Islamic Medicine organization has many articles in Arabic about Ibn Sina & Medicine. (link)
•   Über Ibni Sina und die arabische Medizin (link in German)
• Michot, Y. “A Mamluk Theologian’s Commentary on Avicenna’s  Risla Adhawiyya : Being a Translation of a Part of the  Dar’ al-ta’rud  of Ibn Taymiyya with Introduction, Annotation, and Appendices” Part I,   Journal of Islamic Studies , 2003 14:2 pp.149-203 and Part II ,  Journal of Islamic Studies,  2003 14:3 pp. 309-363 ( PDF ).
• Michot, Y. “Le Riz Trop Cuit Du Kirmânî: Présentation, Éditon Traduction et Lexique de L’épître d’Avicenne Contestant L’accusation d’avoir Pastiché Le Coran”, in F. Dalemans, et. al.  Mélanges Offerts À Hossam Elkhadem par ses Amis et ses Éléves , Bruxelles, 2007. pp. 81-129. ( PDF )
• Michot, Y.  “Al-Nukat wa-l-faw`id : An Important  Summa  of Avicenian  Falsafa” , in Peter Adamson, ed.,  Classical Arabic Philosophy: Sources and Reception , Warburg Institue, London 2007, pp. 90-123. ( pdf )

Conferences:

• 3rd Avicenna Study Group conference theme is going to be on the Avicennaian manuscript tradition.
• First Avicenna Study Group conference at Yale University March 2001.
• Avicenna Study Group  at the  World Congress of Middle East Studies  Associations conference Sept. 8 -13 2002.  (link)

Manuscripts:

• The Canon of Medicine  from the Islamic Medical Manuscripts at the National Library of Medicine. (link)
• Image  of Canon of Medicine. (Local.)
• AUB’s Saab Medical Library pages  on the first printed Canon  (link)

Links and Internet Biographies , just a sample of what is out there! :

• Basic web biography … (link)
• Good Biography with map of his trips. (link)
• A short Biography by Dr. A. Zahoor (link: much copied on the net!)
• A short Biography by Dr. M. Ahmed (link: much copied on the net!)
• The Oxford Companion  to Philosophy article on Avicenna. (link)
• A  short Biography  by T. Kjeilen. (link)
• yet another Biography by M. Christensen. (link)
• U.S. News is on it too. (link)
• BBC why not too! (link)
• The Encyclopedia Britannica entry. (link)
• The  Catholic Encyclopedia  entry. (link)
• Ibn Sina (the Mathematician) from a Math History site  has very good info. (link)
• From the  Philosophical Dictionary . (link)
• The  window’s Philosophers . (link)
• Yet another Bio  with different portrait. (link)
• Yet another Bio By Sr. D. Hess from University of Louisville. (link)

Portraits and stamps (Visuals): 

• ( Ibn Sina Gallery…  Yes we see Ibn Sina everywhere here is more images from stamps, currency, TV, in stone, bronze, marble, etc. (Now 51 images in total) (LOCAL!)

Video & Audio too:

• An Anthology of Philosophy in Persia: Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Mehdi Aminrazavi discuss philosophy in Persia a Library of Congress event. ( link )
• Science in a golden age: Al-Razi, Ibn Sina and the Canon of Medicine narrated by Jim al-Khalili – Al-Jazeera production ( link )
• Hidden Science Superstars: Ibn Sina ( link )
• Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr: Great thinkers series: Ibn Sina. (link)
• Lynn Redgrave narrates: Avicenna & Medieval Muslim Philosophy. (link)
• Boo Ali Sina  the movie (okay its a serial)… (link)

City of his birth and work:

• Avicenna’s city “Hamadan”. (link)

Tomb, statue, etc.

• Avicenna mausoleum . (link)
• Avicenna Museum . (link)
• The Avicenna Dome. (link)
• Ibn Sina Academy of Medieval Medicine & Sciences (link)
• The Avicenna hotel in Istanbul. (link)
• Avicenna Virtual Campus . (link)
• Avicenna’s IQ. (link)
• Avicenna, Schools, Colleges, Clinics, Pharmacies, skin cream, hotels, etc… there is so much named after him.

[…] Al-Ghazali, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Taymiyah, al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Muhammad Iqbal. […]

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• v.14(4); Oct-Dec 2013

The Air of History (Part V) Ibn Sina (Avicenna): The Great Physician and Philosopher

Rachel hajar, m.d..

Non Invasive Cardiology, Department of Cardiology, Heart Hospital, Hamad Medical Corporation, Doha, Qatar

“ Medicine is the science by which we learn the various states of the human body, in health, when not in health, the mean by which health is likely to be lost, and when lost, is likely to be restored to health.” Ibn Sina, The Canon

Undoubtedly, Avicenna is one of the great physicians in Islam and one of the greatest thinkers and medical scholars in history.

Ibn Sina was born in 980 AD near Bukhara in Central Asia (Uzbekhistan) and died in 1037 in Iran. He was born at a time of change and uncertainty in the Muslim world. He began his studies in medicine at the age of thirteen. He became a distinguished physician and his medical expertise brought him to the attention of the Sultan of Bukhara and whom he treated successfully for a serious infection. As reward, he asked only that he be given permission to use the sultan's library and its rare manuscripts, allowing him to continue his research. He was associated with multiple short-lived sultanates, but relocated often, searching for a stable, well-paying position. At various times, he worked as political administrator, court physician, soldier – and occasional outcast and prisoner. During his hectic life, he managed to write nearly 100 books, one of which was al-Qanun, fi al-Tibb or The Canon of Medicine and which was first translated to Latin in the 12 th century, becoming the standard textbook of medicine in European medical schools and continued to be consulted in the Muslim world well into the 20 th century. William Osler described the Canon as “the most famous medical textbook ever written” noting that it remained “a medical bible for a longer time than any other work.[ 1 ]

From the autobiographical sketch that has come down to us, we learn that Ibn Sina was precocious. At the age of ten he knew the Qur’an by heart. Before he was sixteen, he had mastered physics, mathematics, logic, and metaphysics and began the study and practice of medicine. At the age of twenty-one, he wrote his famous “ Qa’nun ”, (Canon) which remained the principal authority in medical schools both in Europe and in Asia for several centuries.

He served successively several Persian potentates as physician and adviser, travelling with them from place to place. Although he was known to be sociable, he was studious and serious, devoting much of his time to writing.

The Canon of Medicine (Kitab al-Qanun fi al-tibb) by Ibn Sina (the illuminated opening of the 4th book). A rare complete copy made in Iran probably at the beginning of the 15th century.

(Source: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/islamic_medical/islamic_07.html )

Ibn Sina is known to the wet as Avicenna. His book, The Canon surveyed the entire medical knowledge available from ancient and Muslim sources at the time in a clear and organized summary. It was originally written in Arabic and later translated into several languages, including Persian, Latin, Chinese, Hebrew, German, French, and English. In addition to bringing together then available knowledge, the book is rich with the author's original contributions.[ 2 ]

The Canon of Medicine set the standards for medicine in Europe and the Islamic world. It is Ibn Sina's most renowned written work alongside The Book of Healing .[ 2 ] Much of the book also formed the basis of Unani (Greek) medicine, a form of traditional medicine still taught in Islamic universities in India. The principles of medicine described by the Canon ten centuries ago are still taught at UCLA and Yale University, among others, as part of the history of medicine.[ 2 ]

Avicenna's important original contributions include such advances as recognition of the contagious nature of tuberculosis; spread of diseases by water and soil; and interaction between psychology and health. In addition to describing pharmacological methods, the book described 760 drugs and became the most authentic materia medica of the era. He wrote a book on cardiac drugs, “ al-adwiyat al-Qalbia ”, which was translated to English as “ Avicenna's Tract on Cardiac Drugs and Essays on Arab Cardiotherapy .”[ 3 ] He was also the first to describe meningitis and made rich contributions to anatomy, gynecology, and child health.[ 2 ]

Avicenna as psychiatrist

Avicenna often used psychological methods to treat his patients. One anecdote was when a malnourished prince of Persia had melancholia, refused to eat and suffered from the delusion that he was a cow. The prince would moo like a cow crying, “ Kill me so that a good stew may be made of my flesh ” and would not eat anything. Ibn Sina was persuaded to the case and sent a message to the patient, asking him to be happy as the butcher was coming to slaughter him, and the sick man rejoiced. When Ibn Sina approached the prince with a knife in his hand, he asked “ where is the cow so I may kill it .” The patient then mooed like a cow to indicate where he was. By order of the butcher, the patient was also laid on the ground for slaughter. When Ibn Sina approached the patient pretending to slaughter him, he said, “ The cow is too lean and not ready to be killed. It must be fed properly and I will kill it when it becomes healthy and fat .” The patient was then offered food which he ate eagerly and gradually “gained strength, got rid of his delusion, and was completely cured.”[ 4 ]

Every beat of the pulse comprises two movements and two pauses. Thus, expansion: pause: contraction: pause. Avicenna, The Canon

As a cardiologist, I was drawn to Avicenna's descriptions of the pulse. Taking the pulse is one of the simplest, oldest, and most informative of all clinical examinations. It is a key diagnostic method in most medical traditions particularly ancient Egyptian medicine, Chinese traditional medicine, Greco Islamic, and Ayurveda medicine.

Throughout the history of medicine, the pulse was an important parameter in assessing cardiac dysfunction, and the tactile examination of the pulse was referred to as “the messenger that never fails.”[ 5 ] The character of the pulse is still one of the most important diagnostic clues in modern medicine. Feeling and interpreting the pulse requires great skill. Pulse-taking was a skillful bedside technique in Greco-Islamic medicine and the Middle Ages.

A physician and his patient (Illustration from The Canon of Medicine of Avicenna for the members of the Classics of Medicine Library)

“ The learned physician should read the happiness and misery of the body by feeling the pulse at the root of the thumb which stands as the witness of the soul .” Sanscrit Law

One ailment in the history of medicine where pulse-taking is extremely useful was lovesickness. Lovesickness is an illness that permeates the history of medicine since the time of Hippocrates. Greek physicians considered falling in love a disease that may lead to death. Historically and traditionally, we have metaphorically attributed feelings and emotions as if they actually originated from the heart. The tradition goes back thousands of years and has enriched our language and literary heritage.

Descriptions of lovesickness have changed extensively over hundreds of years but it may exist today in the guise of psychiatric disorders. The ability to diagnose it was the sign of a great physician. The Egyptian medical tradition considered the pulse as the sole “window” into heart for “the heart speaks out of every limb” and hence, the diagnostic technique employed involved pulse-taking, which became central to its diagnosis. Erasistratus, a Greek physician in the fourth century B.C., and considered the father of physiology, discovered that Antiochus, the son of King Seleucus was lovesick for his stepmother by feeling his pulse. One story tells how Ibn Sina diagnosed that a sultan's wife was secretly lovesick over someone other than her husband while feeling her pulse and asking her questions.[ 5 ]

Title page and spine of The Canon of Medicine of Avicenna in the private library of Dr. H.A. Hajar Albinali.

Pulse-taking has evolved in our time to a highly sophisticated digital beat-to-beat display with blood oxygen monitoring to aid us in making a diagnosis. Hence, careful examination of the pulse is frequently overlooked. Even though pulse-taking is low-tech and inexpensive, a thorough examination of the pulse can provide a lot of information and help form an accurate diagnosis.

As students in medical school and during residency training, we were taught that assessment of the arterial pulse characteristics is an integral part of the cardiovascular examination. Carotid, radial, brachial, femoral, posterior tibial, and dorsalis pedis pulses should be routinely examined – bilaterally – to ascertain any differences in the pulse amplitude, contour, or upstroke. Who can remember all the different pulse findings in chronic severe aortic insufficiency? The textbooks describe ten, yet I remember only three (Corrigan's pulse, bisferiens pulse, and water hammer).

Imagine my shock and surprise on reading Avicenna's The Pulse in The Canon , a special edition of The Classics of Medicine Library, from the collection of Dr. H.A. Hajar Albinali, who kindly lent me his copy. The title reads, A TREATISE ON THE CANON OF MEDICINE OF AVICENNA Incorporating a Translation of the First Book by Cameron Gruner, M.D. (Lond.) and published in 1930. The section on The Pulse is the most detailed and lucid discussion on the features and characteristics of the pulse that I have ever read. Of course, one can find numerous summaries and commentaries on Avicenna's pulse doctrine on the internet and in articles published in medical journals but you would not get the sense of erudition you get on reading the original [translation]. It is a very impressive piece of work. I was quite amazed. Did he personally observe all that or he compiled various observations from various sources? In the English translation that I read, Dr. Cameron Gruner, the translator, has extensive commentary and comparison to ancient Chinese palpation and passages from Galen and other Greek medical writers, so it is very likely that Avicenna compiled them. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable piece of work.

The pulse section consists of thirty-nine (39) pages and covers the definition of the pulse; technique in feeling the pulse; reasons for feeling the pulse at the wrist; the emotional state of the patient and the observer; characteristics of the pulse with detailed explanation; discusses normal from abnormal pulse; the varieties of irregularity; effect of age and gender on the pulse; effect of emotion and personality; effect of the seasons; effects of food and drink; effect of sleep; the pulse during exercise; the pulse in pregnancy; the pulse in pain; and the pulse in inflammation.

The most interesting is the description on the ten features in the pulse:[ 6 ] (see side bar).

In Ibn Sina's classification we recognize certain types of arrhythmias such as atrial fibrillation, premature and dropped beats. He also described different pulses similar to pulses being observed in arterial and ventricular arrhythmias. He described more than fifty identifiable pulses. He distinguished two kinds of irregular pulses: regularly irregular or irregularly irregular, and that the difference might be difficult to appreciate. He compared the rhythm of an irregular pulse to the flight of the gazelle, the “pulsus ghazalans”. The rat-tail pulse described by Ibn Sina is similar to what is known as “pulsus alternans” secondary to a weakened myocardium. “ You may feel a strong pulse followed by a faint pulse. as if you pass your hand on a rat, you feel the body, then the tail feels small compared to the body .” Undulating pulse, dicrotic pulse, and ventricular pulse are a few examples of different types of pulse that were described by him.

Ibn Sina also compared pulse rhythms to musical rhythms. The musical character of the pulse did not escape his attention for he was an accomplished poet. Some of his pulse descriptions are written in the form of Arabic poetry [the Canon was written in Arabic].

It has been over 1000 years since Ibn Sina described the characteristics of a normal and abnormal pulses and how environmental and various conditions and stimuli affect the pulse. His thesis on the pulse is remarkable and many of his remarks on the pulse are still true today but pathological correlation was absent. This is because at that point in time, postmortem examinations were not done or forbidden. Our knowledge and understanding of the pulse in health and disease have evolved by leaps and bounds since then. We know so much more about the pulse now because of the widespread availability of the ECG, sophisticated digital beat-to-beat monitor display, and electrophysiological studies. Unlike the time of Ibn Sina, we have specific therapies for different types of arrhythmias.

It is well-known that the Arabs preserved most of the wisdom and knowledge of antiquity in their writings when Europe was plunged into the Dark Ages. The knowledge and scholarship were re-translated back into Latin during the Renaissance by monk scholars, and medicine was no exception. It is therefore not surprising to find that Ibn Sina's descriptions of the pulse have been described by the Greeks before, most notably by Galen who controlled medical thinking for centuries. Galen's teaching on the pulse dominated clinical practice for about sixteen centuries. Some of his books on the pulse have been lost but eighteen books are known to be extant and are regarded as authentic.[ 7 ] Many journal articles have reproduced Galen's descriptions. I find the similarity in the doctrines and descriptions of the pulse by Galen and Ibn Sina quite striking and startling. Clearly, Ibn Sina subscribed to Galen's pulse doctrines.

What is felt by the fingers must be described to give shades of meaning to a purely subjective perception. Ancient scholars often resorted to comparing pulse rhythms to the motion of animals and Ibn Sina was no exception. As already mentioned, he compares the rhythm of an irregular pulse to the “flight of a gazelle” or pulsus ghazalans , and this was described earlier by Galen as the “leap of a goat”, or pulsus caprizans . Reading such pulse metaphors is rather charming but no longer helpful in our technical-oriented world. Nevertheless, against a background of modern knowledge, I still find Ibn Sina's pulse descriptions extraordinary.

CONCLUSIONS

Avicenna was a product of the rich intellectual, cultural, and scientific ferment that swept the Islamic world. He created a complete philosophical system in the Arabic language. Among the great sages of Islamic medicine, Ibn Sina is the best known in the West. Considered as the successor to Galen, his great medical treatise, the Canon was the standard textbook on medicine in the Arab world and Europe in the 17 th century.

He was a philosopher, physician, psychiatrist and poet. Like Galen, he devoted a large portion of his work to the study of the pulse and his contributions to the field of sphygmology were significant. Avicenna comprehensively covers the subject of the pulse, describes the technique of pulse-taking and records the effects of a variety of conditions on the pulse such as environment, physical condition of patient and emotional states such as anger, pleasure, joy, greaf and fear. Like Galen, he describes ten features in the pulse and more than fifty identifiable pulses. He described different pulses similar to the pulses being observed in arterial and ventricular arrhythmias. According to Avicenna, vital power, resistance, and elasticity, were important in the quality, size, and volume of the pulse. He defined concepts such as resistance and elasticity in a physiological manner.

Feeling the pulse is simple, fast, and inexpensive and is still a very useful diagnostic technique. Ibn Sina's descriptions and concepts on the pulse are the foundation for our current state-of-the-art knowledge on the pulse, arrhythmia, and electrophysiology. It is of course impossible for physicians to note all the characteristics of the pulse on palpation as described by Ibn Sina one thousand years ago, but still, many of his observations on the pulse in health and disease are valid today.

Although many Western historians choose to believe that the Arabs were merely transmitters of Greek achievements, it cannot be denied that Islamic philosophers, scientists, and physicians added their own observations and wisdom to the knowledge that they acquired from more ancient civilizations. They made many original contributions to mathematics, astronomy, physics, alchemy, optics, pharmacology, and medicine. Ibn Sina may have been a follower of Galen but he made many pioneering contributions. Historians agree that he is one of the greatest thinkers and medical scholars in history. He is rightly called the “Prince of Physicians” of his era.

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Life and education

Influence in philosophy and science, influence in medicine.

What did Avicenna write?

Why is avicenna famous.

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• National Center for Biotechnology Information - PubMed Central - Ibn Sina (Avicenna): The Prince Of Physicians
• Encyclopædia Iranica - Avicenna
• Ancient Origins - Who Was Ibn Sina and Why is He a Google Doodle?
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Biography of Ibn Sina
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Biography of Avicenna
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• Avicenna - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

What was Avicenna’s religion?

Avicenna’s religion was Islam .

What was Avicenna’s occupation?

Avicenna served as court physician, political counselor, and administrator to various dynastic rulers in parts of what are now Iran, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.

Avicenna’s most influential works were Kitāb al-shifāʾ ( Book of the Cure , or The Cure ), an encyclopaedic exposition of  logic , physics , mathematics , and metaphysics , and Al-Qānūn fī al-ṭibb  ( The Canon of Medicine ), one of the most important texts in the history of medicine . More than 200 extant works have been attributed to him.

Avicenna combined Neoplatonic and especially Aristotelian philosophy with elements of Islamic theology into a comprehensive system. Latin translations of his work guided the 13th-century reception of Aristotle within Western Scholasticism , notably in the writings of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas . Avicenna’s The Canon of Medicine served as a textbook in Europe until the mid-17th century.

Avicenna (born 980, near Bukhara, Iran [now in Uzbekistan]—died 1037, Hamadan, Iran) was a Muslim physician, the most famous and influential of the philosopher-scientists of the medieval Islamic world . He was particularly noted for his contributions in the fields of Aristotelian philosophy and medicine . He composed the Kitāb al-shifāʾ ( Book of the Cure ), a vast philosophical and scientific encyclopaedia , and Al-Qānūn fī al-ṭibb ( The Canon of Medicine ), which is among the most famous books in the history of medicine .

Avicenna did not burst upon an empty Islamic intellectual stage. It is believed that Muslim writer Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, or possibly his son, had introduced Aristotelian logic to the Islamic world more than two centuries before Avicenna. Al-Kindī , the first Islamic Peripatetic (Aristotelian) philosopher, and Turkish polymath al-Fārābī , from whose book Avicenna would learn Aristotle’s metaphysics , preceded him. Of these luminaries, however, Avicenna remains by far the greatest.

According to Avicenna’s personal account of his life, as communicated in the records of his longtime pupil al-Jūzjānī, he read and memorized the entire Qurʾān by age 10. The tutor Nātilī instructed the youth in elementary logic , and, having soon surpassed his teacher, Avicenna took to studying the Hellenistic authors on his own. By age 16 Avicenna turned to medicine, a discipline over which he claimed “easy” mastery. When the sultan of Bukhara fell ill with an ailment that baffled the court physicians, Avicenna was called to his bedside and cured him. In gratitude, the sultan opened the royal Sāmānid library to him, a fortuitous benevolence that introduced Avicenna to a veritable cornucopia of science and philosophy.

Avicenna began his prodigious writing career at age 21. Some 240 extant titles bear his name. They cross numerous fields, including mathematics , geometry, astronomy , physics, metaphysics , philology , music, and poetry. Often caught up in the tempestuous political and religious strife of the era, Avicenna’s scholarship was unquestionably hampered by a need to remain on the move. At Eṣfahān , under ʿAlā al-Dawlah, he found the stability and security that had eluded him. If Avicenna could be said to have had any halcyon days, they occurred during his time at Eṣfahān, where he was insulated from political intrigues and could hold his own scholars’ court every Friday, discussing topics at will. In this salubrious climate, Avicenna completed Kitāb al-shifāʾ , wrote Dānish nāma-i ʿalāʾī ( Book of Knowledge ) and Kitāb al-najāt ( Book of Salvation ), and compiled new and more-accurate astronomical tables.

While in the company of ʿAlā al-Dawlah, Avicenna fell ill with colic . He treated himself by employing the heroic measure of eight self-administered celery-seed enemas in one day. However, the preparation was either inadvertently or intentionally altered by an attendant to include five measures of active ingredient instead of the prescribed two. That caused ulceration of the intestines. Following up with mithridate (a mild opium remedy attributed to Mithradates VI Eupator , king of Pontus [120–63 bce ]), a slave attempted to poison Avicenna by surreptitiously adding a surfeit of opium. Weakened but indefatigable , he accompanied ʿAlā al-Dawlah on his march to Hamadan . On the way he took a severe turn for the worse, lingered for a while, and died in the holy month of Ramadan .

In 1919–20 British Orientalist and acclaimed authority on Persia Edward G. Browne opined that “Avicenna was a better philosopher than physician, but al-Rāzī [Rhazes] a better physician than philosopher,” a conclusion oft repeated ever since. But a judgment issued 800 years later begs the question: By what contemporary measure is an appraisal of “better” made? Several points are needed to make the philosophical and scientific views of these men comprehensible today. Theirs was the culture of the ʿAbbāsid Caliphate (750–1258), the final ruling dynasty built on the precepts of the first Muslim community ( ummah ) in the Islamic world. Thus, their cultural beliefs were remote from those of the 20th-century West and those of their Hellenistic predecessors. Their worldview was theocentric (centred on God)—rather than anthropocentric (centred on humans), a perspective known to the Greco-Roman world. Their cosmology was a unity of natural, supernatural, and preternatural realms.

Avicenna’s cosmology centralized God as the Creator—the First Cause , the necessary Being from whom emanated the 10 intelligences and whose immutable essence and existence reigned over those intelligences. The First Intelligence descended on down to the Active Intelligence, which communicated to humans through its divine light , a symbolic attribute deriving authority from the Qurʾān.

Avicenna’s most important work of philosophy and science is Kitāb al-shifāʾ , which is a four-part encyclopaedia covering logic, physics, mathematics, and metaphysics. Since science was equated with wisdom, Avicenna attempted a broad unified classification of knowledge. For example, in the physics section, nature is discussed in the context of eight principal sciences, including the sciences of general principles, of celestial and terrestrial bodies, and of primary elements, as well as meteorology , mineralogy, botany , zoology , and psychology (science of the soul ). The subordinate sciences, in order of importance, as designated by Avicenna, are medicine; astrology ; physiognomy , the study of the correspondence of psychological characteristics to physical structure; oneiromancy , the art of dream interpretation; talismans , objects with magical power to blend the celestial forces with the forces of particular worldly bodies, giving rise to extraordinary action on earth; theurgy, the “secrets of prodigies,” whereby the combining of terrestrial forces are made to produce remarkable actions and effects; and alchemy , an arcane art studied by Avicenna, although he ultimately rejected its transmutationism (the notion that base metals, such as copper and lead, could be transformed into precious metals, such as gold and silver). Mathematics is divided into four principal sciences: numbers and arithmetic, geometry and geography, astronomy, and music.

Logic was viewed by Avicenna as instrumental to philosophy, an art and a science to be concerned with second-order concepts. While he was generally within the tradition of al-Fārābī and al-Kindī, he more clearly dissociated himself from the Peripatetic school of Baghdad and utilized concepts of the Platonic and Stoic doctrines more openly and with a more independent mind. More importantly, his theology—the First Cause and the 10 intelligences—allowed his philosophy, with its devotion to God as Creator and the celestial hierarchy , to be imported easily into medieval European Scholastic thought.

Despite a general assessment favouring al-Rāzī ’s medical contributions, many physicians historically preferred Avicenna for his organization and clarity. Indeed, his influence over Europe’s great medical schools extended well into the early modern period. There The Canon of Medicine ( Al-Qānūn fī al-ṭibb ) became the preeminent source, rather than al-Rāzī’s Kitāb al-ḥāwī ( Comprehensive Book ).

Avicenna’s penchant for categorizing becomes immediately evident in the Canon , which is divided into five books. The first book contains four treatises , the first of which examines the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) in light of Greek physician Galen of Pergamum ’s four humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile). The first treatise also includes anatomy. The second treatise examines etiology (cause) and symptoms, while the third covers hygiene, health and sickness, and death’s inevitability. The fourth treatise is a therapeutic nosology (classification of disease) and a general overview of regimens and dietary treatments. Book II of the Canon is a “Materia Medica,” Book III covers “Head-to-Toe Diseases,” Book IV examines “Diseases That Are Not Specific to Certain Organs” (fevers and other systemic and humoral pathologies), and Book V presents “Compound Drugs” (e.g., theriacs, mithridates, electuaries, and cathartics). Books II and V each offer important compendia of about 760 simple and compound drugs that elaborate upon Galen’s humoral pathology.

Unfortunately, Avicenna’s original clinical records, intended as an appendix to the Canon , were lost, and only an Arabic text has survived in a Roman publication of 1593. Yet, he obviously practiced Greek physician Hippocrates ’ treatment of spinal deformities with reduction techniques, an approach that had been refined by Greek physician and surgeon Paul of Aegina . Reduction involved the use of pressure and traction to straighten or otherwise correct bone and joint deformities such as curvature of the spine . The techniques were not used again until French surgeon Jean-François Calot reintroduced the practice in 1896. Avicenna’s suggestion of wine as a wound dressing was commonly employed in medieval Europe. He also described a condition known as “Persian fire” ( anthrax ), correctly correlated the sweet taste of urine to diabetes , and described the guinea worm .

Avicenna’s influence extends into modern medical practice. Evidence-based medicine , for example, is often presented as a wholly contemporary phenomenon driven by the double-blind clinical trial . But, as medical historian Michael McVaugh pointed out, medieval physicians went to great pains to build their practices upon reliable evidence. Here, Avicenna played a leading role as a prominent figure within the Greco-Arabic literature that influenced such 13th-century physicians as Arnold of Villanova ( c. 1235–1313), Bernard de Gordon (fl. 1270–1330), and Nicholas of Poland ( c. 1235–1316). It was Avicenna’s concept of a proprietas (a consistently effective remedy founded directly upon experience) that permitted the testing and confirmation of remedies within a context of rational causation . Avicenna, and to a lesser extent Rhazes, gave many prominent medieval healers a framework of medicine as an empirical science integral to what McVaugh called “a rational schema of nature.” This should not be assumed to have led medieval physicians to construct a modern nosology or to develop modern research protocols . However, it is equally ahistorical to dismiss the contributions of Avicenna, and the Greco-Arabic literature of which he was such a prominent part, to the construction of modalities of care that were fundamentally evidence-based.

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The Achievements of Ibn Sina in the Field of Science and His Contributions to Its Philosophy

Ibn Sina is generally known as one of the most important philosophers and physicians, one whose contributions to science and philosophy have attracted numerous studies. This article provides an outline of his philosophy of science which determined the framework for his understanding of natural philosophy. Rather than being of historical interest, the article argues, Ibn Sina's philosophy of science is a useful beginning for developing a contemporary Islamic philosophy of science. The article also discusses Ibn Sina's importance in the philosophy of health and medicine. Keywords: Contributions of Ibn Sina in various sciences; Islamic philosophy of science; health and medicine in Islam; Ibn Sina and contemporary Islamic intellectual thought. Ibn Sina is without doubt the most widely known intellectual figure concerned with science in Islamic civilization. He has, in fact, gained the image of a folk hero, especially in the zones of Arabic, Persian, and Turkic cultures, where numerous stories concerning his exceptional intellectual powers came into being in the form of folktales told by grandmothers to their grandchildren over the centuries. Moreover, his medical heritage is alive wherever Islamic medicine is still practiced, such as in Pakistan and India, and his influence as a philosopher and even theologian is to be felt wherever the Islamic philosophical tradition survives, as in Persia. The sign of respect for him as almost the archetype of the Muslim philosopher-scientist can be seen in the number of hospitals, schools, and centers of research bearing his name from Morocco to Malaysia. In this essay we shall limit the definition of science to the mathematical and natural, while remembering that Ibn Sina also made major contributions to the sciences of language, music, psychology, etc., and even the occult sciences (al-'ulum al-gharibah), not to speak of the supreme science or metaphysics (al-ilahiyyat) which determined the framework for his understanding of natural philosophy (al-ilahiyyat).

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— Philosophical doctrines and the scientific worldview of an epoch from which a scholar gets too much impressed, attain the status of the standard of rationality for him. He begins to think that to believe these ideas as compared to the ones believed by past generations, is more rational and logical. On the contrary, iman bil-ghaib (faith in the unseen) is the foundation of religion. This is the prime quality of the muttaqin (ones who qualify for attaining guidance from the Qur'an.) i The muttaqin firmly believe that if any metaphysical notion, principle of logic, or scientific worldview is contrary to the teachings of the revealed truth, fault lies not with the assertions of faith but with the metaphysical notion, logic, or science. Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, the renowned Muslim philosophers of the 10 th and the 11 th century are very close to each other in their philosophical views but Ibn Sina (Avicenna) developed these ideas much more than al-Farabi did. In history of Muslim philosophy they both are referred to as Muslim philosophers. ii The Muslim philosophers got so much impressed by Plato and Aristotle that they accepted their philosophical views as the standard of rational truth. As Muslim they believed religion as the revealed truth. In the history of religious philosophy, this desire for reconciliation has emerged in the form of reconstruction of religious thought in terms of prevalent philosophical and scientific theories. This is undertaken with the purpose to make the rational face of religion more bright. But in the end it is the religion that suffers. In their attempt at the reconciliation of religion and philosophy, Muslim philosophers had to deny all the major beliefs of Islam. To quote just one example here: Volition has been ascribed in the Qur'an to God as His Dignity and Majesty. The God-fearing ones believe that Allah has created the universe at Will and has created it ex-nihilo. They find no contradiction in believing Volition to be an attribute of God. Since volition had been denied by Aristotle to be an attribute worthy of God, Muslim philosophers too had to deny it; and with it they too had to deny the creation of the universe by God at His Will and Command. Imam Ghazali, with great philosophical acumen, locates the presuppositions which made them deviate from standard Qur'anic beliefs and reconstructs them so as to prove Islamic beliefs fully rational. Averroes makes his best to defend Avicenna against al-Ghazali's criticism but did not succeed. Controversy between these thinkers is not merely an intellectual heritage of Muslim history, but also has intimate relevance with our own times. This provides us with a criterion to examine succeeding attempts as well as our own approach towards evolving a Qur'anic paradigm for defining relationship between religion and the philosophico-scientific world-view of our own times. Rational supernaturalism and theology of modernity propounded by Sir Seyyed Ahmed Khan, construction of a scientific form of religious thought by Dr. Muhammad Iqbal, sociological interpretation of Islam and especially presentation of tauhid as world-view by Dr. Ali Shari'ati, blending creationism and evolutionism into a harmonious whole by Dr. Israr Ahmed, bifurcating the personality of the Prophet (pbuh) into various facets by Dr. Israr Ahmed, Dr. Ishaq Zafar Ansari and Maulana Abdul Waheed, the scientific interpretation of the Qur'an theory by Maurice Bucaille to prove the divine origin of the Qur'an, Islamization of Knowledge theories by IIIT, Ziau uddin Sardar, Seyyed Hossein Nasr and similar attempts by various contemporary scholars need to be seen and evaluated in this perspective. The writer considers attempts in the history of Muslim civilization from Avicenna to the contemporary scholars at the reconstruction of religious thought not to be on appropriate lines and proposes that the Muslim philosophers should be on their guard against such attempts and resist such irrationalities presented in the garb of rationality.

Religious Inquiries

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This article is a brief review of Ibn Sina’s practical philosophy. It begins with a discussion of the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Neo-Platonic influences on Ibn Sina’s practical philosophy, as well as the influence of Farabi, and of Islamic religious teachings. The creative synthesis invented by Ibn Sina requires a particular view of the relation between religion and philosophy in such a manner that religion shapes the direction of philosophical inquiry, and philosophy opens the way to a more profound and esoteric understanding of religion.

In: The Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion. Edited by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro. 4 volumes. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell

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Avicenna was the most significant Muslim philosopher and physician of the Middle Ages. He understood philosophy as a systematic and universal scientific endeavor, and considerably shaped the way in which theological and religious matters – just as much as concerns from within metaphysics, natural philosophy, and logic – have been conceived by Muslim, Christian, and Jewish authors writing in the wake of his accomplishments. His long-lasting influence is attested by numerous commentaries and reactions to his account of reality. Central aspects of his philosophy include the account of God as well as the scientific explanation of creation, prophecy, evil, and the afterlife.

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“This article will discuss the importance of knowing precisely between knowledge and science. Regarding this matter, the discussion would like to introduce two different points of view about Universe; from Scientists and Islamic perspective, because from which philosophers and Scientists formulate or synthesized their findings and results of their observations according to the preconscious Ideas. This is a preliminary effort to discuss on how the reality of sciences (haqa’iq al-‘ulum) and the knowledge (al-ma‘rifat) can help mankind knowing, establishing and acknowledging Allah and His present and existence. By knowing these, we could learn the privilege of Islamic fundamentals and requirements for sciences and knowledge. Hence, they should entails upon Muslims especially or Non-Muslim in general into the ultimate truth and justice to the Knowledge and Science & Technology. This is what is supposed to be in scientific and technological application in the worldly lives.”

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IBN SINA (AVICENNA)

Ibn Sina ( Avicenna ) (980-1037) is one of the foremost philosophers of the golden age of Islamic tradition that also includes al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd . He is also known as al-Sheikh al-Rais (Leader among the wise men) a title that was given to him by his students. His philosophical works were one of the main targets of al-Ghazali ’s attack on philosophical influences in Islam. In the west he is also known as the " Prince of Physicians " for his famous medical text al-Qanun "Canon". In Latin translations, his works influenced many Christian philosophers, most notably Thomas Aquinas .  

CORPUS (Works):

In Original Language (Arabic/Persian): Autobiography in Arabic Html Biography by his student in Arabic word file.  Biography from Uyun al'anba fi tabaqat al-'atibia' by Ibn 'abi asaiba' (Arabic word file) Isharat wa-Tanbahat (Remarks and Admonitions) (ed. S. Dunya) Commentary by Nasirudeen at-Tusi :    Volume 1: Logic ( PDF , file size: 25000 kb)   Volume 2: Physics ( PDF , file size: 13100 kb)   Volume 3: Metaphysics ( PDF , file size: 8400 kb)   Volume 4: Sufism ( PDF , file size: 4601 kb) Kitab an-Najat (Book of Safety) (ed. M. Fakhry) (PDF, File size 9723 Kb) Somewhat edited e-text in word format . (1.2 megs) with hyperlinked table of contents Somewhat edited e-text in html format.  (6.5 megs) with hyperlinked table of contents. Kitab al-mabda' wa l-ma'ad  (PDF, File size TBD Kb) Ishart (*Unedited e-text in word format) with commentary maybe by Tusi in four parts (from warraq): Part I Part II Part III Part IV Kitab ash-Shifa (Book of Healing) Part 1: Ilhyat:  Minor editing of e-text in word format . (from warraq) (1.2) Ilhyat in Arabic html format . (5.4 Megs) big file -with table of contents. Part 2: Psychology (Tabiyat: ilm an-Nafs) ed. Jan Bakos ( PDF , file size: 18304kb) (link) Part 3: Logic madkhal - maqulat - maqiyas ( Zipped in 3 Arabic word files) A gift from Mufid Dankali. Canon of Medicine (al-Qanun fi al-tibb) . (link to complete 1593 edition) thanks to B. Ludvigsen & AUB. Kitab al-Hudud (livre des définitions) (Arabic-French) ed. (A. M. Goichon) ( PDF , file size: 2624kb) Uyun al-Hikmah: e-text in word format . (from warraq) Risala fi'l 'ashq (Treatise on Love) Trans. E. Fackenheim . ( PDF , file size: 1919kb) also available in word file .  al-Mubhathat (discussions) from Aristu inda' al-Arab (Aristotle According to Arabs) edited by A. Badawi. (Arabic PDF 10200 kb) Ibn Sînâ. Lettre au vizir Abû Sa‘d. Editio princeps d’après le manuscrit de Bursa, traduction de l’arabe, introduction, notes et lexique, « Sagesses Musulmanes, 4 », Paris, Albouraq, 1421/2000, XII, 130*, 61, 4 et 186 p. ISBN 2-84161-150-7. Attributed works (Questionably by Ibn Sina): Risala fi al-Huzn (from a rare Persian manuscript) (Arabic PDF , file size: 78kb) Danish Nameh Alali (Book of knowledge dedicated to Alai Dawlah) (In Persian) we are looking for it. If you have it do let me know. French Translation . (French PDF , file size: 27.2 Megs) 4 volumes.   In English & other languages: Medieval Sourcebook: Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (973-1037): On Medicine ( link) Overview of Shifa . (link) Kitab al-mabda' wa l-ma'ad (Annotated "exploratory" French Translation by Prof. Y. Michot.) (PDF, File size 427 Kb) Remarks and Admonitions Part One: On Logic (Vol. 1 Ishart & Tanbihat) Tr. S. Inati ( PDF , file size: 5585kb) Ibn Sina & Mysticism (Vol. 4 Ishart & Tanbihat) Tr. S. Inati ( PDF , file size: 4591kb) Danish Nameh Alali (Book of knowledge dedicated to Alai Dawlah) (Logic) pdf link.

Bibliography:

• Mu'allfat Ibn Sina (Works of Ibn Sina) By: G. C. Anawati. (Arabic PDF 12701 kb)
• AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY ON IBN SINA (1970-1989) by: J. Janssens. (link: book Abstract.)
• There is also a supplement to the above. (link)

Works ON IBN SINA:

In Arabic: The inquiry of Avicenna concerning the corporal form by L. Khayrallah . Arabic word file. Ibn Sina and dental care (link: in Arabic). This site has a lot on the Medical theories of Ibn Sina. Childcare according to Ibn Sina (link: in Arabic). Cosmetics in the Canon (link: in Arabic). The distinction between existence and essence in the philosophy of Avicenna . by L. Khayrallah . Arabic word file. Explications de quelques arguments avicenniens contre la théorie des parties insécables. by L. Khayrallah . Arabic word file. In English & other languages: Avicenna, Jon McGinnis, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, ISBN: 9780195331486. Avicenna and His Legacy, Y. Tzvi Langermann, ed. Turnhout: Berpols, 2009, ISBN: 9782503527536. A New Standard for Avicenna Studies . By D. Reisman (PDF) 3.5 megs. Avicenna His life and works . By S. Afnan. pdf format. Biography from History of Muslim Philosophy . (pdf) by Prof. F. Rahman Biography and works from the Encyclopedia Iranica. ( www.iranica.com ) (pdf) 4.2 megs. Biography & Works from Encyclopedia of Islam...(e-text) Biography & Works from Encyclopedia of Religion...(PDF e-text). (File Size: 498 KB)  Biography & works from Routledge...(e-text) Avicenna on Casual Priority . M. Marmura. ( PDF , file size: 543 KB) Avicenna on Theology A. J. Arberry. (pdf -link) Avicenna's Chapter on the Relative in the Metaphysics of the Shifa . M. Marmura. ( PDF , file size: 554 KB)   Ibn Sina's `Burhan Al-Siddiqin' - Journal of Islamic Studies. Vol. 12, # 1. Jan. 2001. pp.18-39. pdf . (pdf -link complete e-text) By: T. Mayer La distinction de l'existence et de l'essence dans la philosophie d'Avicenna . Par: L. Khayrallah . (French- word file) Ibn-Sina on the human soul , in Notes and observations on natural science, Book II, Section 5. By J. Kenny O. P. (link) God Physics: From Hawkings to Avicenna . By: W. Carroll (e-text in word only 82KB) An article about the Danesh Nameh translated from Russian. PDF.  Ibn Sina from: " A Medical History of Persia and the Eastern Caliphate " by C. Elgood. (link) An Evaluation of Ibn Sina's Argument for God's Existence in the Metaphysics of the Isharat , By: T. Mayer (link -Abstract only). Nader El-Bizri's interpretation of Ibn Sina: (link -Book Abstract). International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine . (link) AVICENNA AND HIS HERITAGE Edited by J. JANSSENS and D. DE SMET (link) Islamic Medicine organization has many articles in Arabic about Ibn Sina & Medicine. (link)   Über Ibni Sina und die arabische Medizin (link in German) Michot, Y. “A Mamluk Theologian’s Commentary on Avicenna’s Risla Adhawiyya : Being a Translation of a Part of the Dar' al-ta'rud of Ibn Taymiyya with Introduction, Annotation, and Appendices” Part I,  Journal of Islamic Studies , 2003 14:2 pp.149-203 and Part II , Journal of Islamic Studies, 2003 14:3 pp. 309-363 ( PDF ). Michot, Y. "Le Riz Trop Cuit Du Kirmânî: Présentation, Éditon Traduction et Lexique de L'épître d'Avicenne Contestant L'accusation d'avoir Pastiché Le Coran", in F. Dalemans, et. al. Mélanges Offerts À Hossam Elkhadem par ses Amis et ses Éléves , Bruxelles, 2007. pp. 81-129. ( PDF ) Michot, Y. "Al-Nukat wa-l-faw`id : An Important Summa of Avicenian Falsafa" , in Peter Adamson, ed., Classical Arabic Philosophy: Sources and Reception , Warburg Institue, London 2007, pp. 90-123. ( pdf ) Searches: Hippias: Avicenna - Ibn Sina . (links) *** Noesis: Avicenna - Ibn Sina . (links) Google: Avicenna - Ibn Sina . (links) Altavista: Avicenna - Ibn Sina .  (links) Conferences: 3rd Avicenna Study Group conference theme is going to be on the Avicennaian manuscript tradition. First Avicenna Study Group conference at Yale University March 2001 . Avicenna Study Group at the World Congress of Middle East Studies Associations conference Sept. 8 -13 2002.  (link) Manuscripts: The Canon of Medicine from the Islamic Medical Manuscripts at the National Library of Medicine. (link) Image of Canon of Medicine. (Local.) AUB's Saab Medical Library pages on the first printed Canon (link)

Links and Internet Biographies , just a sample of what is out there! :

Basic web biography ... (link) Good Biography with map of his trips. (link) A short Biography by Dr. A. Zahoor (link: much copied on the net!) A short Biography by Dr. M. Ahmed (link: much copied on the net!) The Oxford Companion to Philosophy article on Avicenna. (link) A short Biography by T. Kjeilen. (link) yet another Biography by M. Christensen. (link) U.S. News is on it too. (link) BBC why not too! (link) The Encyclopedia Britannica entry. (link) The Catholic Encyclopedia entry. (link) Ibn Sina (the Mathematician) from a Math History site has very good info. (link) From the Philosophical Dictionary . (link) The window's Philosophers . (link) Another Ibn Sina Bio (in French). (link) Yet another Bio with different portrait. (link) Yet another Bio By Sr. D. Hess from University of Louisville. (link) Yet another very brief Bio philosophical review. (link)

Portraits and stamps (Visuals): 

• ( Ibn Sina Gallery... Yes we see Ibn Sina everywhere here is more images from stamps, currency, TV, in stone, bronze, marble, etc. (Now 51 images in total) (LOCAL!)

Video & Audio too:

• Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr: Great thinkers series : Ibn Sina . (link)
• Lynn Redgrave narrates: Avicenna & Medieval Muslim Philosophy . (link)
• Boo Ali Sina the movie (okay its a serial)... (link)

City of his birth and work:

Avicenna's city "Hamadan" . (link)

Tomb, statue, etc.

Avicenna mausoleum . (link) Avicenna Museum . (link) The Avicenna Dome . (link) Ibn Sina Academy of Medieval Medicine & Sciences (link) The Avicenna hotel in Istanbul . (link) Avicenna Virtual Campus . (link) Avicenna's IQ . (link) Avicenna, Schools, Colleges, Clinics, Pharmacies, skin cream, hotels, etc... there is so much named after him.

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This website is dedicated to the study of the philosophical works of Ibn Sina. Our aim is to provide original language works, translations and scholarly articles. We also encourage fellow scholars and students to join in this noble effort. Our initial efforts will be to collect as much source material as possible. We hope that we can offer not only in digitized form but e-texts as well of Ibn Sina's works. Everything that available locally on this site is provided free of charge. We hope that this effort makes your study of Ibn Sina easier. Please provide us with your input or critique into any facet of this site.

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Biography Of Ibn Sina (bangla)

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