By Individual Philosopher > Avicenna (Ibn Sina)

Avicenna (Ibn Sina)
(Portrait by Ali Kari c. 1331)

Introduction

Avicenna (AKA Ibn Sina or Ibn Seena or, in full, Abu Ali al-Hussain Ibn Abdallah Ibn Sina) (980 - 1037) was a Persian philosopher, physician and polymath in the Medieval period (Islam's Golden Age).
He was one of the most learned men of his time in a wide variety of subjects, and is often considered one of the greatest thinkers and scholars in history. In particular, he is regarded by many as the father of early modern medicine.
As a philosopher and a devout Muslim, he tried to reconcile the rational philosophy of Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism with Islamic theology. He also developed his own system of Logic, known as Avicennian Logic, and founded the philosophical school of Avicennism, which was highly influential among Muslim and Western European Scholastic thinkers alike.

Life

Avicenna (the Latinized distortion of the actual Arab name Ibn Sina) was bornaround 980 in his mother's home town of Afshana, near Bukhara (then part of the extensive Persian empire, now in modern-day Uzbekistan, Central Asia). His father was a respected Ismaili scholar fom Balkh (in modern-day Afghanistan, but then also part of the Persian empire), a high official of the Samanidadministration and, at the time of his son's birth, the governor of a village in one of the estates of the Samanid emir, Nuh ibn Mansur.
We have details of much of Avicenna's early life from his own autobiography. In his early years, he was educated by his father, and he had a remarkable memory and an ability to learn which amazed the scholars who met in his father's home. By the age of ten he had memorised the Qur'an and most of the Persian and Arabic poetry which he had read; he learnedjurisprudence at an early age from the Hanafi scholar Ismail al-Zahid; at thirteen he began to study medicine, and he had mastered that subject by the age of sixteen, when he began to treat patients (often without taking payment) and to discover new methods of treatment; by eighteen, he had achieved full status as a qualified physician. He also studied Logic andMetaphysics, partly on his own (he prided himself on being self-taught) but also receiving instruction from some of the best teachers of his day, including the famous mathematician Abu ‘Abdallah al-Natili among others.
Due to his reputation as a physician in that area, the Samanid dynasty ruler Nuh ibn Mansur came to hear of him, and as a reward for curing the emir of an illness in 997, Avicenna was granted the use the Royal Library of the Samanids, which proved important for his further development in the whole range of scholarship.
In 1002, Avicenna's father died and then, soon after, the Samanids were deposed by the Turkish Qarakhanids. Avicennadeclined the offers of new ruler Mahmud of Ghazni and, without the support of a patron or his father, he began a life of wandering around the towns of Nishapur, Merv and Khorasan. He acted as a physician and administrator by day, while every evening he gathered students round him for philosophical and scientific discussion. For a period he was court physician and vizier at Hamadan (west-central Iran), despite threats of banishment by the emir, and at one point he was forced into hiding and even spent some time as a political prisoner. He began his two most important medical works ("The Book of Healing" and "The Canon of Medicine") during his time at Hamadan.
In 1022, on the death of the Buwayhid prince Shams al-Daula who he was serving in Hamadan and the ensuing political chaos, Avicenna dramatically escaped out of the city in the dress of a Sufi ascetic. After ten years of constantly moving from place to place, amidst political turmoil and uncertainty, he finally settled in Isfahan in central Iran, at the court of the local prince Abu Ja'far 'Ala Addaula, whom he accompanied as physician and general literary and scientific adviser. During a fifteen year period of relative calm and peace, he completed his major works begun at Hamadan, and also wrote many other works on philosophy, medicine and the Arabic language.
While accompanying his patron on one of his many military campaigns (as his duties required), Avicenna was seized with asevere colic, which he was unable to check with his own remedies. He managed to reach Hamadan, where he finally resigned himself to his fate, gave away his goods on the poor, freed his slaves, and finally died in June of 1037.

Work

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Avicenna wrote almost 450 treatises on a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 have survived (150 of these concentrate on philosophy and 40 on medicine). Almost half of his works are versified, his poems appearing in both Arabic and Persian. His most famous works are "The Book of Healing" (a vast philosophical and scientific encyclopedia) and "The Canon of Medicine"(a standard medical text at many Islamic and European universities up until the early 19th Century).
Avicenna wrote extensively on early Islamic philosophy, including two treatises named "Logic" and "Metaphysics". Hiscommentaries on the works of Aristotle often "corrected" the philosopher, encouraging a lively debate in the spirit of ijtihad (a term used in Islamic law describing independent interpretation of the sources). Due to the success of Avicenna'sreconciliation of Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism with Islamic Kalam, Avicennism became the leading school of Islamic philosophy by the 12th Century. His philosophy was also influential in medieval Europe: even if it was proscribed in 1210, it nevertheless had a great impact on leading Scholastics such as William of Auvergne (1190 - 1249), Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas.
Avicenna's Metaphysics owes much to his 10th Century Persian predecessor al-Farabi (particularly as regards the thorny issue of essence and existence), but also to Aristotle. His early work "Compendium on the Soul" was dedicated to establishing that the rational soul or intellect is incorporeal and indestructible, without resorting to Neo-Platonic insistence on its pre-existence (i.e. "essence precedes existence").
According to Avicenna, the universe consists of a chain of actual beings, each giving existence to, and responsible for, the rest of the chain below (angels, souls and all of creation). He argued that, as an infinite chain is impossible, the chain as a whole must terminate in a being that is wholly simple, self-sufficient and one, whose essence is its very existence (i.e. God). This is a combination of the Ontological Argument and Cosmological Argument for the existence of God (see the section onPhilosophy of Religion), and a very early use of the method of a priori proof, utilizing intuition and reason alone.
Avicenna developed his own system of Logic, known as Avicennian Logic, as an alternative to Aristotelian Logic, and by the 12th Century it had replaced Aristotelian Logic as the dominant system in the Islamic world. Avicennian Logic had an influenceon early medieval European logicians such as Albertus Magnus, although Aristotelian Logic later became more popular in Europe with the strong influence of Averroës. Avicenna developed an early theory of the hypothetical syllogism as well aspropositional calculus, an area of Logic not covered in the Aristotelianism tradition. He also contributed inventively to the development of inductive logic, mainly through his medical writings.
In Epistemology, Avicenna developed the concept of the tabula rasa (the idea that individual human beings are born with no innate or built-in mental content), which strongly influenced later Empiricists like John Locke, and the nature versus nurturedebate in modern philosophy and psychology. He developed a theory of knowledge based on four faculties: sense perception, retention, imagination and estimation. He was also the first to describe the methods of agreement, difference andconcomitant variation which are critical to inductive logic and the scientific method, which was essential to later scientific methodology.
While he was imprisoned near Hamadan, Avicenna formulated his famous "Floating Man" thought experiment to demonstrate human self-awareness and the substantiality of the soul. He asked his readers to imagine themselves suspended in the air,isolated from all sensations, even sensory contact with their own bodies. He argued that one would still have self-consciousness, and so the self is not logically dependent on any physical thing, and the soul is therefore a primary or givensubstance.
Avicenna developed a medical system that combined his own personal experience with that of Islamic medicine, the medical system of the Greek physicians Hippocrates (460 - 370 B.C.) and Galen (129 - 200 A.D.), and ancient Persian,Mesopotamian and Indian medicine. In particular, he is credited with: the introduction of systematic experimentation andquantification into the study of physiology; the discovery of the contagious nature of infectious diseases and the introduction ofquarantine to limit the spread of contagious diseases; the introduction of experimental medicine and the establishment of rules and principles for testing the effectiveness of new drugs and medications (which still form the basis of clinical pharmacology and modern clinical trials); the discovery of the concept of syndromes; the identification of the importance ofdietetics and the influence of climate and environment on health; the pioneering of aromatherapy treatment; the anticipation of the existence of micro-organisms; and early work on psychology, neuropsychiatry, psychophysiology and psychosomatic medicine (he first described numerous neuropsychiatric conditions such as hallucination, insomnia, mania, nightmare, melancholia, dementia, epilepsy, paralysis, stroke, vertigo and tremor).
In the physical sciencs, he is considered the father of the fundamental concept of momentum (part of his elaborate theory ofmotion), and was the first to employ an air thermometer to measure air temperature in scientific experiments. He was the first to successfully classify simple machines (lever, pulley, screw, wedge and windlass) and their combinations. He reasoned that the speed of light is finite, on the grounds that the perception of light is due to the emission of some sort of particles, a very prescient notion. In earth sciences, his hypotheses on the geological causes of mountains came very close to the truth many centuries before it was proven.

As a strict believer in Empiricism, he refuted the study of astrology as being conjectural rather than empirical (and anyway conflicting with orthodox Islam). He also refuted alchemy and discredited the theory of the transmutation of substancescommonly believed by the alchemists of the day.

Neo-Platonism is a Hellenistic school of philosophy founded by Plotinus in the 3rd Century A.D. The term "neo-platonism" itself was not used in ancient times (it was in fact not coined until the early 19th Century), and Neo-Platonists would have considered themselves simply Platonists, although their beliefs demonstrate significant differences from those of Plato.
The Egyptian philosopher Plotinus (along with his lesser-known teacher, Ammonius Saccas), is widely considered the founderof Neo-Platonism, developing his theories initially in Alexandria in his native Egypt, and then later in Rome. He was influenced by the teachings of classical Greek philosophy, but also by Persian and Indian philosophy (from his extensive travels) andEgyptian theology. Although his original intention was merely to preserve the teachings of Plato and Socrates, he effectively fused Platonism (more specifically, Middle Platonism) with oriental mysticism.
Neo-Platonism is generally a religious philosophy, combining a form of idealistic Monism with elements of Polytheism. It teaches the existence of an ineffable and transcendent One, from which emanates the rest of the universe as a sequence oflesser beings (although later Neo-Platonic philosophers added hundreds of intermediate beings such as gods, angels and demons).
Plotinus's student, Porphyry (c. 233 - 309 A.D.), assembled Plotinus's teachings into the six "Enneads". Porphyry was a Syrian Neo-Platonist philosopher, who also wrote widely on astrology, religion, mathematics and musical theory, and was a strongopponent of Christianity and defender of Paganism.
Iamblichus Chalcidensis (c. 245 - 325 A.D.) was another Syrian (and student of Porphyry), who was instrumental in determining the direction taken by later Neo-Platonic philosophy. One of the last major Greek philosophers, Proclus Lycaeus (412 - 485A.D.), set forth possibly the most elaborate, complex and fully-developed Neo-Platonic systems, even incoporating the ancient Greek gods into the Neo-Platonic hierarchical system. Other important Neo-Platonists include Hypatia of Alexandria (370 - 415 A.D.), the Roman Emperor Julian (c. 331 - 363 A.D.), Hierocles of Alexandria (active around 430 A.D.), Simplicius of Cilicia (c. 490 - 560 A.D.) and Damascius (c. 458 - 538 A.D.), the last teacher of Neo-Platonism at Athens.
Some central tenets of Neo-Platonism (e.g. that evil is merely the absence of good, which comes from human sin) were very influential in St. Augustine of Hippo's development of Christian dogma, although eventually he effectively abandoned Neo-Platonism altogether in favour of a doctrine based more on his own reading of Scripture. The influence of Neo-Platonism onOrigen (c. 185 - 254A.D.), as well as on Boethius, John Scotus Eriugena (c. 815 – 877) and St. Bonaventura (1221 - 1274), also proved significant for both the Eastern Orthodox and Western branches of Christianity.
In the Middle Ages, Neoplatonist ideas influenced Jewish thinkers, including Solomon ibn Gabirol (1021 - 1058) and the Kabbalist Isaac the Blind (1160 - 1235), as well as Islamic and Sufi thinkers such as al-Farabi (872 - 951), Avicenna andMaimonides.
There was something of a Neo-Platonist revival during the Italian Renaissance, with such luminaries as Nicholas Cusanus(1401 - 1464), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463 - 1494), Marsilio Ficino (1433 - 1499), Michelangelo (1475 - 1564),Sandro Botticelli (1445 - 1510), the Medici family and, later, Giordano Bruno (1548 - 1600), as well as with the Cambridge Platonists in 17th Century England.

By Movement / School > Medieval > Avicennism

Avicennism is a Medieval school of philosophy founded by the 11th Century Persian philosopher Avicenna (also known as Ibn Sina). Avicenna tried to redefine the course of Islamic philosophy and channel it into new directions, and particularly toreconcile Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism with Islamic theology.

Avicenna's work, particularly his Metaphysics, had a profound influence on other medieval Scholastics such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus and William of Auvergne. Despite some criticism by later Muslim theologians, Avicennism became the leading school of Islamic philosophy by the 12th Century, and even today forms the basis of philosophic education in the Islamic world

Early Islamic philosophy and theology distinguishes more clearly than Aristotelianism the difference between existence (the domain of the contingent and the accidental) and essence (which endures within a being, beyond the accidental). Avicennaargued that the fact of existence can not be inferred from, or accounted for, by the essence of existing things, and that form and matter by themselves cannot interact and originate the movement. He argued that some existing thing must necessitate, impart, give or add existence to an essence, and that "essence precedes existence" (Essentialism).

According to Avicenna, the universe consists of a chain of actual beings, each giving existence to, and responsible for, the rest of the chain below (angels, souls and all of creation). He argued that, as an infinite chain is impossible, the chain as a whole must terminate in a being that is wholly simple, self-sufficient and one, whose essence is its very existence (i.e. God). This is a combination of the Ontological Argument and Cosmological Argument for the existence of God (see the section onPhilosophy of Religion), and a very early use of the method of a priori proof, utilizing intuition and reason alone.

Avicenna also developed his own system of Logic, known as Avicennian Logic, as an alternative to Aristotelian Logic, and by the 12th Century it had replaced Aristotelian Logic as the dominant system of Logic in the Islamic world. Avicennian Logic had an influence on early medieval European logicians such as Albertus Magnus, although Aristotelian Logic later became popular in Europe due to the strong influence of Averroism. Avicenna developed an early theory of the hypothetical syllogism as well aspropositional calculus, an area of Logic not covered in the Aristotelianism tradition. He also contributed inventively to the development of inductive logic, mainly through his medical writings.

In Epistemology and the theory of knowledge, Avicenna developed the concepts of Empiricism and the tabula rasa (the idea that individual human beings are born with no innate or built-in mental content), which strongly influenced John Locke's formulation of tabula rasa and intuitive reasoning, and later gave rise to the nature versus nurture debate in modern philosophy and psychology. He was also the first to describe the methods of agreement, difference and concomitant variation which are critical to inductive logic and the scientific method, which was essential to later scientific methodology.

Later in the 12th Century, the Sufi mystic Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi (1155 - 1191) developed Illuminationism, a combinationof Avicennism and ancient Persian philosophy, along with many new innovative ideas of his own. However, Avicennism was alsocriticized by several Muslim theologians.

Al-Ghazali (1058 - 1111), Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (1149 - 1209) and the Ash'ari theologians objected to Avicennism mainly on the grounds of its inconsistencies with the Qur'an and Hadith. Al-Ghazali's famous work "The Incoherence of the Philosophers"was specifically aimed at Avicenna, particularly his assertions that the world has no beginning in the past and is not created in time, that God's knowledge includes only classes of beings and not individual beings (universals not particulars), and that after death the souls of humans will never again return into bodies.

Averroës criticized Avicenna mainly due to his divergence from Aristotle. In particular, he rejected the theory of the celestial Souls and of an imagination which is independent of the corporeal senses. Averroism eventually proved more influential in theChristian West than Avicennism.

In the 17th Century, Mulla Sadra (c. 1571 – 1640) combined the vision of Sufi metaphysics with some of the rationalisticapproach of Avicenna, eventually leading to a whole new philosophy known as Transcendent Theosophy. However, he opposed Avicennism's Essentialism, and espoused the opposite idea of "existence precedes essence", a key foundational concept of later Existentialism.

By Movement / School > Medieval > Scholasticism

Scholasticism is a Medieval school of philosophy (or, perhaps more accurately, a method of learning) taught by theacademics of medieval universities and cathedrals in the period from the 12th to 16th Century. It combined Logic, Metaphysicsand semantics into one discipline, and is generally recognised to have developed our understanding of Logic significantly.

The term "scholastic" is derived from the Latin word "scholasticus" and the Greek "scholastikos" (meaning literally "devoting one's leisure to learning" or "scholar") and the Greek "scholeion" (meaning "school"). The term "schoolmen" is also commonly used to describe scholastics.

Scholasticism is best known for its application in medieval Christian theology, especially in attempts to reconcile the philosophy of the ancient classical philosophers (particularly Aristotle) with Christian theology. However, in the High Scholasticperiod of the 14th Century, it moved beyond theology, and had applications in many other fields of study includingEpistemology, Philosophy of Science, philosophy of nature, psychology and even economic theory.

Essentially, Scholasticism is a tool and method for learning which places emphasis on dialectical reasoning (the exchange of argument, or thesis, and counter argument, or antithesis, in pursuit of a conclusion, or synthesis), directed at answering questions or resolving contradictions. In medieval Europe, dialectics (or logic) was one of the three original liberal arts (the"trivium"), in addition to rhetoric and grammar.

There are perhaps six main characteristics of Scholasticism:

An acceptance of the prevailing Catholic orthodoxy.
Within this orthodoxy, an acceptance of Aristotle as a greater thinker than Plato.
The recognition that Aristotle and Plato disagreed about the notion of universals, and that this was a vital question to resolve.
Giving prominence to dialectical thinking and syllogistic reasoning.
An acceptance of the distinction between "natural" and "revealed" theology.
A tendency to dispute everything at great length and in minute detail, often involving word-play.

The Scholastic method is to thoroughly and critically read a book by a renowned scholar or author (e.g. The Bible, texts ofPlato or St. Augustine, etc), reference any other related documents and commentaries on it, and note down any disagreements and points of contention. The two sides of an argument would be made whole (found to be in agreement and not contradictory) through philological analysis (the examination of words for multiple meanings or ambiguities), and through logical analysis(using the rules of formal logic to show that contradictions did not exist but were merely subjective to the reader).

These would then be combined into "questionae" (referencing any number of sources to divine the pros and cons of a particular general question), and then into "summae" (complete summaries of all questions, such as St. Thomas Aquinas' famous "Summa Theologica", which claimed to represent the sum total of Christian theology at the time).

Scholastic schools had two methods of teaching: the "lectio" (the simple reading of a text by a teacher, who would expound on certain words and ideas, but no questions were permitted); and the "disputatio" (where either the question to be disputed was announced beforehand, or students proposed a question to the teacher without prior preparation, and the teacher would respond, citing authoritative texts such as the Bible to prove his position, and the students would rebut the response, and the argument would go back and forth, with someone taking notes to summarize the argument).

Scholasticism was concurrent with movements in early Islamic philosophy, some of which presaged and influenced European Scholasticism. From the 8th Century, the Mutazilite School of Islam pursued a rational theology known as Kalam to defend their principles against the more orthodox Ash'ari School, and can be seen as an early form of Scholasticism. Later, the Islamic philosophical schools of Avicennism and Averroism exerted great influence on Scholasticism. There were also similar developments in medieval Jewish philosophy (especially the work of Maimonides).

St. Anselm of Canterbury is sometimes misleadingly referred to as the "Father of Scholasticism", although his approach was not really in keeping with the Scholastic method. Probably a better example of Early Scholasticism is the work of Peter Abelardand Peter Lombard (c. 1100 - 1160), particularly the latter's "Sentences", a collection of opinions on the Church Fathers and other authorities. Other early Scholastics include Hugh of St. Victor (1078 - 1151), Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 - 1153),Hildegard of Bingen (1098 - 1179), Alain de Lille (c. 1128 - 1202) and Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135 - 1202).

The Franciscan and Dominican orders of the 13th Century saw some of the most intense scholastic theologizing of High Scholasticism, producing such theologians and philosophers as Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas, Alexander of Hales(died 1245) and St. Bonaventure (1221 - 1274). This period also saw a flourishing of mystical theology, such as Mechthild of Magdeburg (1210 - 1285) and Angela of Foligno (1248 - 1309), and early natural philosophy (or "science") at the hands of such men as Roger Bacon and Robert Grosseteste (c. 1175 - 1253).

Late Scholasticism (14th Century onwards) became more complex and subtle in its distinctions and arguments, including thenominalist or voluntarist theologies of men like William of Ockham. Also notable during the Late Scholasticism period are John Duns Scotus, Meister Eckhart (1260 - 1328), Marsilius of Padua (1270 - 1342), John Wycliffe (c. 1320 - 1384), Julian of Norwich (1342 - 1413), Geert Groote (1340 - 1384), Catherine of Siena (1347 - 1380), Jean Gerson (1363 - 1429), Jan Hus(c. 1369 - 1415) and Thomas a Kempis (1380 - 1471).

Thomism and Scotism are specific off-shoots of Scholasticism, following the philosophies of St. Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus respecitively.

Scholasticism was eclipsed by the Humanism of the 15th and 16th Centuries, and it came to be viewed as a rigid, formalistic and outdated way of conducting philosophy. It was briefly revived in the Spanish School of Salamanca in the 16th Century, and in the Catholic Scholastic revival (Neo-Scholasticism) of the late 19th and early 20th Century, although with a somewhatnarrower focus on certain scholastics and their respective schools of thought, most notably St. Thomas Aquinas.

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