Ibn Sīnā
- LAST REVIEWED: 29 September 2014
- LAST MODIFIED: 02 March 2011
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195390155-0040
- LAST REVIEWED: 29 September 2014
- LAST MODIFIED: 02 March 2011
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195390155-0040
Introduction
Ibn Sīnā (370–429 AH/980–1037 CE) is generally considered to be one of the most creative thinkers within the Peripatetic tradition, doing much to formalize the structure of philosophy of his time. Like most of the other philosophers, he was also interested in mysticism, although the extent of this interest is often overemphasized. Known as Avicenna in Latin, he went on in translation to have a considerable impact on Jewish and Christian thought and established for the first time a highly developed systematic approach to theoretical problems. His work on medicine is particularly important, and here as elsewhere it is the exactitude with which he wrote and his attempt to be comprehensive that is so impressive. It was written over a considerable period while he was on the move in Iran and yet displays a remarkable coherence and completeness. His style is often elusive and suggestive when he is writing on subjects he regards as having a deeper meaning.
Life
Ibn Sīnā was born in 370 AH/980 CE near Bukhara and at thirteen started to study medicine, and he reports in Ibn Sīnā 1974 successful treatment of the Sultan of Bukhara, which first brought him into the official public eye. He became involved in the intrigue among the various claimants for the throne, and his personal life was difficult; at the same time, however, he managed to complete a number of significant philosophical works, including the Kitab al-shifā’ (Book of healing), a compendium of ideas and arguments that established him as the leading exponent of falsafa (Peripatetic philosophy) during his time. The Kitāb al-najāt (Book of salvation), an abridgment of al-Shifā’, probably helped establish his status, since as Goodman 1992 suggests, Ibn Sīnā provides a summary of his more complicated theses that is far more accessible than the complete work. His al-Ishārāt wa’l-tanbī hāt (Remarks and admonitions) is also an attractive work, which Inati 1984 and Inati 1996a describe as helping readers to work through various types of logical arguments for themselves. Some of Ibn Sīnā’s short works are lost, not surprising given the tumultuous life that he lived. And he wrote on not only philosophy but also science, language, poetry, and especially medicine. His work on medicine, al-Qanun, continued to wield influence in Christian Europe for many centuries after his death and continues to be used in local medicine in the Islamic world today. The title means “the canons [of medicine],” and the implication is that the total sum of contemporary medical knowledge is in it. Ibn Sīnā did not lack ambition, or a high opinion of himself, as his autobiography clearly displays.
Goodman, Lenn. Avicenna. London: Routledge, 1992.
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The best general account of Ibn Sīnā’s philosophy.
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Heath, Peter. Allegory and Philosophy in Avicenna, Ibn Sīnā: With a Translation of the Book of the Prophet Muhammad’s Ascent to Heaven. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.
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Useful discussion of the links between Ibn Sīnā’s theology and philosophy.
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Ibn Sīnā. The Metaphysica of Avicenna (Ibn Sínā): A Critical Translation-Commentary and Analysis of the Fundamental Arguments in Avicenna’s Metaphysica in the Dānish nāma-i ‘Alā’i. Edited and translated by Parviz Morewedge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.
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(The book of scientific knowledge.) Originally a Persian text representing Ibn Sīnā’s attempt to explain his ideas to a more general audience.
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Ibn Sīnā. The Life of Ibn Sīnā: A Critical Edition and Annotated Translation. Edited and translated by William E. Gohlman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974.
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A translated critical edition of Ibn Sīnā’s autobiography, Sirat al-shaykh al-ra’is.
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Ibn Sīnā. “Ibn Sīnā’s ‘Essay on the Secret of Destiny.’” In Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics. Translated by George F. Hourani, 227–248. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
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Excellent unfussy translation and clear analysis of Risalah fi sirr al-qadar by Hourani.
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Ibn Sīnā. The Metaphysics of The Healing: A Parallel English-Arabic Text. Edited and translated by Michael E. Marmura. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2005.
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One of Ibn Sīnā’s most important and influential works. The definitive translation and edition.
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Inati, Shams C. Remarks and Admonitions. Part 1, Logic. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984.
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Useful account and translation of Ibn Sīnā’s thought on logic and reasoning.
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Inati, Shams C. Ibn Sīnā and Mysticism: Remarks and Admonitions. Part 4. London: Kegan Paul, 1996a.
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A thorough study accompanied with an introduction and annotated translation of Ibn Sīnā’s al Isharat wat-Tanbihat: at-Tasawwuf (mysticism).
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Inati, Shams C. “Ibn Sīnā.” In History of Islamic Philosophy. Edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman, 231–246. London: Routledge, 1996b.
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Balanced analysis of Ibn Sīnā’s main ideas and role in Islamic philosophy.
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Bibliography
The general bibliographical literature on Islamic philosophy has material on Ibn Sīnā. Also worth mentioning are Gutas 1989, Janssens 1991, and Janssens 1999.
Daiber, Hans. Bibliography of Islamic Philosophy. 2 vols. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1999–2007.
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Excellent and comprehensive bibliography by a major authority in Islamic studies.
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Gutas, Dimitri. “Ibn Sīnā.” In Encyclopaedia Iranica. Vol. 3. Edited by Ehsan Yarshater, 67–70. New York: Routledge, 1989.
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An article containing excellent bibliographical material on Ibn Sīnā. Available online.
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Janssens, Jules. An Annotated Bibliography on Ibn Sīnā (1970–1989), Including Arabic and Persian Publications and Turkish and Russian References. Louvain, Belgium: Louvain University Press, 1991.
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The essential place to find bibliographical material.
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Janssens, Jules. An Annotated Bibliography on Ibn Sīnā: First Supplement (1990–1994). Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium: Fédération internationale des instituts d’études médiévales, 1999.
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An update on the first volume. Impressive in its scope and accuracy.
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Offers useful bibliographical material on this thinker and scientist.
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The Intelligible Nature of the Universe
Ibn Sīnā 1959 and Wisnovsky 2003 outline the theory of God as pure intellect from which everything else emanates and insists this is an entirely rational process: meaning that any individual thing can be linked both to God and to other things logically. The structure of reality can then be understood to represent a series of syllogisms, with some principles being more abstract and general—the categories such as “thing,” “necessary,” “existence,” and so forth—while others are derived from them. Advanced knowledge consists of the knower grasping the middle term, the proposition that connects the other parts of a syllogism. It is the middle term that links premises to their conclusions, so once one understands this, the whole syllogism or process of reasoning becomes clear. The highest level of such knowledge is prophecy, where the most abstract understanding possible to human beings is attained in different degrees. The prophet has a purely rational soul and can know the most basic ideas and how they feature in syllogisms. In effect, he understands the rational structure of the world, and so knows what will happen and what has happened in the past. The ordinary person only grasps this to a limited extent and requires the guidance of the prophet in order to understand how to live.
Ibn Sīnā. Avicenna’s De Anima: Being the Psychological Part of Kitab al-shifa. Translated by Fazlur Rahman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959.
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Ibn Sīnā’s commentary on a key Aristotelian text, which gives a good idea of his approach to the Greek philosopher.
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Wisnovsky, Robert. Avicenna’s Metaphysics in Context. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.
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Careful approach to the topic.
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Philosophical Psychology
Davidson 1992 explains how Ibn Sīnā formulated a comprehensive account of human faculties and how imagination plays a significant role. It is the faculty of using images and linking those images with both the abstract world of ideas and the ordinary world of sense perception. His theory follows the thinking of al-Farabi, who established the central role of the imagination in Islamic philosophy. In his commentary on Aristotle’s aesthetics, Ibn Sīnā presents the view explained by Kemal 1991 that poetry and drama follow a syllogistic form: where the conclusion of the argument is some shared judgment about how moved one is by something, or amused, or frightened. Imagination is not then a faculty that operates entirely as a result of passion, or arbitrarily, but it channels our ideas and feelings in a rational direction and produces information that can be shared with others—an indication of its logical basis. Nonetheless, Ibn Sīnā would not claim that poetry works at a very high level of demonstrative or logical rigor. On the contrary, poetry is appropriate to address an unsophisticated audience that needs material and vivid examples before they can understand what is going on. He is operating with a theory common to Islamic philosophy: that one addresses different audiences in different ways. And so the prophet, the philosopher, and the poet may well all know the same things. But they express that truth in different ways when communicating with people who can only be reached through those different approaches.
Davidson, Herbert A. Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of the Human Intellect. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
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Acute analysis of the leading Peripatetic thinkers in the Islamic world and their links with their Greek predecessors.
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Kemal, Salim. The Poetics of Alfarabi and Avicenna. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1991.
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Clear and comprehensive account of Ibn Sīnā’s approach to aesthetics.
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Ontology
Ibn Sīnā makes a basic distinction between existence and essence. Rahman 1958, a classic article on this issue, emphasizes that from the essence or concept of something, no implication may be drawn about its existence. As Morwedge 1972 points out, we can think of things that do not exist, but also things exist that we never think about. Yet, some things do exist, and we might wonder how something that need not exist could come into existence. It may be brought into existence through another thing that might or might not exist, and as Marmura 1980 shows, this leads to an infinite regress, unless we can posit a necessary thing—something that must exist and that sets the whole chain of existence going. God is the being whose essence includes his existence—he cannot not exist—and is the only being of which this is true. And everything that exists stems from God, through a long and complex process along Neoplatonic lines, where higher beings bring lower beings from possibility to actuality, and the lower forms of existence emanate from the higher. Bäck 1992 analyzes the modal consequences of this view, while Leaman 2009 shows how later ishraqi philosophy worked, with Ibn Sīnā’s ontology as its starting point.
Bäck, Allen. “Avicenna’s Conception of Modalities.” Vivarium 30 (1992): 217–255.
DOI: 10.1163/156853492X00142Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
An investigation of Avicenna’s approach to modal logic.
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Leaman, Oliver. Islamic Philosophy: An Introduction. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009.
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Account of some of the leading ideas and arguments of Ibn Sīnā.
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Marmura, Michael E. “Avicenna’s Proof from Contingency for God’s Existence in the Metaphysics of al Shifa.” Medieval Studies 42 (1980): 337–352.
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A clear exposition of the proof and its links with wider issues.
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Morewedge, Parviz. “Philosophical Analysis and Ibn Sīnā’s ‘Essence-Existence’ Distinction.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 92 (1972): 425–435.
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An interesting explanation of the implications of a distinction central to Ibn Sīnā’s proof of God’s existence.
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Rahman, Fazlur. “Essence and Existence in Avicenna.” Medieval and Renaissance Studies 4 (1958): 1–16.
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The paper considers the philosophical usefulness of the essence-existence distinction and has been influential in framing the debate in recent years.
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The Soul
Since the important thing about thinking is thinking abstractly, for Ibn Sīnā the soul has to be incorporeal. He argues that this is because to think about something means there is a resemblance between the object of thought and thinker, and the soul is one thing, not composite, and so it cannot be broken up into many different things upon our death. Here, he departs radically from Aristotle, for whom the soul is merely the form of the body and so dissolves when the body perishes. This notion of the soul as spiritual led to the attack on this style of philosophy by al-Ghazali in his Tahāfut al-falāsifa (al-Ghazali 1997). He not only argued that the notion of soul as spiritual was heretical but also that it does not follow logically from Ibn Sīnā’s premises. This is not an idea that fits in easily with the Qur’anic account of the afterlife, but then the philosophers on the whole tend to argue, following Ibn Sīnā, that the material description of the afterlife in the Qur’an needs to be reinterpreted. He also has problems with the notion that God can punish or reward us as individuals in the next life, since the deity cannot know what we as individuals do in this life—because, as Marmura 1962 shows, God cannot have knowledge of us as contingent particulars. This sort of direct knowledge is inappropriate for a pure thinking being, and the notion of emanation and different levels of being explains how out of such a being the lower forms of existence and knowledge can be produced. But this obviously poses another difficulty for a literal understanding of the Qur’an, in which text the afterlife is such an important idea; and for reward and punishment to be appropriate, one assumes that the judge would need to know precisely what those he is judging have done. Al-Ghazali classifies this as not only erroneous but also heretical. Leaman 2002 analyzes in detail the debate and shows how it went on to involve Ibn Rushd.
al-Ghazali. The Incoherence of the Philosophers/Tahâfut al-falâsifa, a Parallel English-Arabic Text. Edited and translated by M. E. Marmura. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1997.
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The major critique of Ibn Sīnā.
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Leaman, Oliver. An Introduction to Classical Islamic Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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An account of the main principles of the thinker’s philosophy and a discussion of its origins in earlier thinkers and its development in subsequent Islamic philosophy.
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Marmura, Michael E. “Some Aspects of Avicenna’s Theory of God’s Knowledge of Particulars.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 82 (1962): 299–312.
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A clear explanation of Ibn Sīnā’s view that God’s knowledge is very different from ours.
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Ibn Sīnā the Mystic?
There is a controversy in the study of Ibn Sīnā that relates to his links with mysticism, if any. It has to be said that virtually all the Islamic philosophers were attracted in one form or another to mysticism, but some such as Nasr 1976, Nasr 1996, Corbin 1980, and Corbin 1993 have argued that Ibn Sīnā thought of “Eastern philosophy” as a deeper form of thought. Others such as Gutas 1988 have suggested that this is a misreading and that by “Eastern” he meant a form of thought from east of where he lived and not necessarily anything especially mystical.
Corbin, Henry. Avicenna and the Visionary Recital. Translated by Willard Trask. Irving, TX: Spring Publications, 1980.
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A defense of the view that Ibn Sīnā is basically a mystic. Originally published in 1960 (New York: Pantheon).
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Corbin, Henry. History of Islamic Philosophy. Translated by Liadain Sherrard. London: Kegan Paul, 1993.
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An interpretation of Ibn Sīnā that emphasizes his role in Persian culture and as a mystical thinker.
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Gutas, Dimitri. Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1988.
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Contains a translation of Ibn Sīnā’s autobiography.
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Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. Three Muslim Sages: Avicenna, Suhrawardi, Ibn ‘Arabi. Delmar, NY: Caravan, 1976.
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Links Ibn Sīnā with a long tradition of mystical thought in the ancient and Islamic world. Originally published in 1964 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
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Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. “Ibn Sīnā’s Oriental Philosophy.” In History of Islamic Philosophy. Edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman, 247–251. London: Routledge, 1996.
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Concise and interesting defense of the idea that Ibn Sīnā really did have a distinctive system of mystical philosophy.
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Influence
Janssens 2006 argues that The Canon of Medicine by Ibn Sīnā was widely read by Europeans in the Latin translation of Gerard of Cremona made in the 12th century. Despite its enormous size, there were other translations later on, which is evidence of its popularity. His philosophical works were also much read in the Jewish and Christian medieval worlds, and this is outlined by the authors in McGinnis and Reisman 2004 and his position as the main representative of the Islamic Peripatetic movement was widely accepted by those in other cultures interested in exploring philosophical ideas and arguments.
Janssens, Jules. Ibn Sīnā and His Influence on the Arabic and Latin World. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006.
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Comprehensive account of the significance of Ibn Sīnā’s thought and its impact on later thought.
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Kemal, Salim. “Ibn Sīnā.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 4. Edited by Edward Craig, 647–654. London: Routledge, 1998.
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Useful approach to Ibn Sīnā’s general ideas and their impact.
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Marmura, Michael E. Probing in Islamic Philosophy: Studies in the Philosophies of Ibn Sīnā, al-Ghazālī, and Other Major Muslim Thinkers. Binghamton, NY: Global Academic, 2005.
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Some of the major modern critical accounts of Ibn Sīnā.
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Marmura, Michael E., and Oliver Leaman. “Avicenna.” In Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Donald M. Borchert, 432–436. New York: Macmillan, 2006.
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Clear and careful account of Ibn Sīnā’s central ideas and their influence.
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McGinnis, Jon, and David C. Reisman, eds. Interpreting Avicenna: Science and Philosophy in Medieval Islam; Proceedings of the Second Conference of the Avicenna Study Group. Islamic Philosophy, Theology, and Science 56. Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2004.
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Useful collection of papers on differing approaches to understanding Ibn Sīnā.
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