Abu ali ibn sina biography samples

It runs to twenty-two large volumes in the Cairo edition —83and its contents exhibit all the parts of philosophy in the Aristotelian tradition which they reproduce, revise, adjust, expand, and re-present, as follows:. 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. Toward the end of his life Avicenna wrote two more summae in slightly divergent modes. 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.

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. Some marginal notes on De animasurviving independently as transcribed in a manuscript, have the same approach and manifestly belong to the same period and project GS 11c; Gutas b. 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.

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 Barnesp.

When philosophy was resuscitated after a hiatus of about two centuries ca. But the social context in which philosophy now found itself had changed. 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 nowbut that the request for it should have come from his society is telling evidence of its cultural attitude regarding science. 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. 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 years separating him from Aristotle Avicenna gives this quite accurate number himselfbut could view the entire tradition as essentially Aristotelian.

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. 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 abu ali ibn sina biographies samples 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. 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.

He wrote more, and more frequently, on these two subjects than on anything else. Lameer Marmura 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.

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.

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. 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 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 This knowledge, which represents and accounts for reality and the way things are, also corresponds, Avicenna maintains, with what is found in books, i.

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 abu ali ibn sina biographies samples, 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. 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 abu ali ibn sina biography samples 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.

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.

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 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 storedimagination, estimation judging the imperceptible significance or connotations for us of sensed objects, like friendship and enmity, which also includes instinctive sensingand memory—and how they can help or hinder the intellect in hitting upon the middle term and perceiving intelligibles more generally.

In his work Mi'yar al-'aqul ibn Sina defines simple machines and combinations of them which involve rollers, levers, windlasses, pulleys, and many others. Although the material was well-known and certainly not original, nevertheless ibn Sina's classification of mechanisms, which goes beyond that of Heronis highly original. Since ibn Sina's major contributions are in philosophy, we should at least mention his work in this area, although we shall certainly not devote the space to it that this work deserves.

He discussed reason and reality, claiming that God is pure intellect and that knowledge consists of the mind grasping the intelligible. To grasp the intelligible both reason and logic are required. But, claims ibn Sina [ 26 ] Grasp of the intelligibles determines the fate of the rational soul in the hereafter, and therefore is crucial to human activity.

Ibn Sina gives a theory of knowledge, describing the abstraction in perceiving an object rather than the concrete form of the object itself. In metaphysics ibn Sina examined existence. He considers the scientific and mathematical theory of the world and ultimate causation by God. His aims are described in [ 1 ] as follows:- Ibn Sina sought to integrate all aspects of science and religion in a grand metaphysical vision.

With this vision he attempted to explain the formation of the universe as well as to elucidate the problems of evil, prayer, providence, prophecies, miracles, and marvels. Ibn Sina is known to have corresponded with al-Biruni. In [ 10 ]eighteen letters which ibn Sina sent to al-Biruni in answer to questions that he had posed are given. These letters cover topics such as philosophy, astronomy and physics.

There is other correspondence from ibn Sina which has been preserved which has been surveyed in the article [ 31 ]. The topics of these letters include arguments against theologians and those professing magical powers, and refutation of the opinions of those having a superficial interest in a branch of knowledge. Ibn Sina writes on certain topics in philosophy, and writes letters to students who must have asked him to explain difficulties they have encountered in some classic text.

The authors of [ 31 ] see ibn Sina as promoting natural science and arguing against religious men who attempt to obscure the truth. References show. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica. W E Gohlman ed. L Goodman, Avicenna London, D Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian tradition Leiden, I M Muminov ed. S Kh Sirazhdinov ed. G W Wickens ed. Nauk Tadzhik.

SSR Otdel. Avicenna was subsequently released, and went to Isfahan, where he was well received by Ala al-Dawla. In the words of Juzjani, the Kakuyid ruler gave Avicenna "the respect and esteem which someone like him deserved". During the brief occupation of Isfahan by the Ghaznavids in JanuaryAvicenna and Ala al-Dawla relocated to the southwestern Iranian region of Khuzistanwhere they stayed until the death of the Ghaznavid ruler Mahmud r.

It was seemingly when Avicenna returned to Isfahan that he started writing his Pointers and Reminders. He died shortly afterwards in Hamadan, where he was buried. Avicenna wrote extensively on early Islamic philosophyespecially the subjects logicethics and metaphysicsincluding treatises named Logic and Metaphysics. Most of his works were written in Arabic, then the language of science in the Muslim world, and some in Early New Persian.

Of linguistic significance even to this day are a few books that he wrote in Persian, particularly the Danishnama. Avicenna's commentaries on Aristotle often criticized the philosopher, [ 54 ] encouraging a lively debate in the spirit of ijtihad. Avicenna's Neoplatonic scheme of emanations became fundamental in kalam in the 12th century.

The Book of Healing became available in Europe in a partial Latin translation some fifty years after its composition under the title Sufficientiaand some abu ali ibn sina biographies samples have identified a "Latin Avicennism" as flourishing for some time paralleling the more influential Latin Averroismbut it was suppressed by the Parisian decrees of and Avicenna's psychology and theory of knowledge influenced the theologian William of Auvergne [ 57 ] and Albertus Magnus[ 57 ] while his metaphysics influenced the thought of Thomas Aquinas.

Early Islamic philosophy and Islamic metaphysicsimbued as it is with kalam, distinguishes between essence and existence more clearly than Aristotelianism. Whereas existence is the domain of the contingent and the accidental, essence endures within a being beyond the accidental. The philosophy of Avicenna, particularly that part relating to metaphysics, owes much to al-Farabi.

The search for a definitive Islamic philosophy separate from Occasionalism can be seen in what is left of his work. He argued that the fact of existence cannot 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 of the universe or the progressive actualization of existing things.

Existence must, therefore, be due to an agent-cause that necessitates, imparts, gives, or adds existence to an essence. To do so, the cause must be an existing thing and coexist with its effect. Avicenna's consideration of the essence-attributes question may be elucidated in terms of his ontological analysis of the modalities of being; namely impossibility, contingency and necessity.

Avicenna argued that the impossible being is that which cannot exist, while the contingent in itself mumkin bi-dhatihi has the potentiality to be or not to be without entailing a contradiction. When actualized, the contingent becomes a 'necessary existent due to what is other than itself' wajib al-wujud bi-ghayrihi. Thus, contingency-in-itself is potential beingness that could eventually be actualized by an external cause other than itself.

The metaphysical structures of necessity and contingency are different. Necessary being due to itself wajib al-wujud bi-dhatihi is true in itself, while the contingent being is 'false in itself' and 'true due to something else other than itself'. The necessary is the source of its own being without borrowed existence. It is what always exists.

Furthermore, It is 'One' wahid ahad [ 61 ] since there cannot be more than one 'Necessary-Existent-due-to-Itself' without differentia fasl to distinguish them from each other. Yet, to require differentia entails that they exist 'due-to-themselves' as well as 'due to what is other than themselves'; and this is contradictory. If no differentia distinguishes them from each other, then, in no sense are these 'Existents' not the same.

None, however, of the Muslim philosophers engaged so much in transmitting Aristotle's lore as did the two men just mentioned. Avicenna made an argument for the existence of God which would be known as the " Proof of the Truthful " wajib al-wujud. Avicenna argued that there must be a Proof of the Truthful, an entity that cannot not exist [ 68 ] and through a series of arguments, he identified it with God in Islam.

Ibn Sina was a devout Muslim and sought to reconcile rational philosophy with Islamic theology. He aimed to prove the existence of God and His creation of the world scientifically and through reason and logic. Avicenna wrote several short treatises dealing with Islamic theology. These included treatises on the prophets and messengers in Islamwhom he viewed as "inspired philosophers", and also on various scientific and philosophical interpretations of the Quran, such as how Quranic cosmology corresponds to his philosophical system.

In general, these treatises linked his philosophical writings to Islamic religious ideas; for example, the body's afterlife. There are occasional brief hints and allusions in his longer works, however, that Avicenna considered philosophy as the only sensible way to distinguish real prophecy from illusion. He did not state this more clearly because of the political implications of such a theory if prophecy could be questioned, and also because most of the time he was writing shorter works which concentrated on explaining his theories on philosophy and theology clearly, without digressing to consider epistemological matters which could only be properly considered by other philosophers.

Later interpretations of Avicenna's philosophy split into three different schools; those such as al-Tusi who continued to apply his philosophy as a system to interpret later political events and scientific advances; those such as al-Razi who considered Avicenna's theological works in isolation from his wider philosophical concerns; and those such as al-Ghazali who selectively used parts of his philosophy to support their own attempts to gain greater spiritual insights through a variety of mystical means.

It was the theological interpretation championed by those such as al-Razi which eventually came to predominate in the madrasahs. Avicenna memorized the Quran by the age of ten, and as an adult, wrote five treatises commenting on surahs of the Quran. One of these texts included the Proof of Propheciesin which he comments on several Quranic verses and holds the Quran in high esteem.

Avicenna argued that the Islamic prophets should be considered higher than philosophers. Avicenna is generally understood to have been aligned with the Hanafi school of Sunni thought. While he was imprisoned in the castle of Fardajan near Hamadhan, Avicenna wrote his famous " floating man "—literally falling man—a thought experiment to demonstrate human self-awareness and the substantiality and immateriality of the soul.

Avicenna believed his "Floating Man" thought experiment demonstrated that the soul is a substance, and claimed humans cannot doubt their own consciousness, even in a situation that prevents all sensory data input. The thought experiment told its readers to imagine themselves created all at once while suspended in the air, isolated from all sensationswhich includes no sensory contact with even their own bodies.

He argued that, in this scenario, one would still have self-consciousness. Because it is conceivable that a person, suspended in air while cut off from sense experiencewould still be capable of determining his own existence, the thought experiment points to the conclusions that the soul is a perfection, independent of the body, and an immaterial substance.

Abu ali ibn sina biography samples

Avicenna referred to the living human intelligenceparticularly the active intellectwhich he believed to be the hypostasis by which God communicates truth to the human mind and imparts order and intelligibility to nature. Following is an English translation of the argument:. One of us i. Then contemplate the following: can he be assured of the existence of himself?

He does not have any doubt in that his self exists, without thereby asserting that he has any exterior limbs, nor any internal organs, neither heart nor brain, nor any one of the exterior things at all; but rather he can affirm the existence of himself, without thereby asserting there that this self has any extension in space. Even if it were possible for him in that state to imagine a hand or any other limb, he would not imagine it as being a part of his self, nor as a condition for the existence of that self; for as you know that which is asserted is different from that which is not asserted and that which is inferred is different from that which is not inferred.

Therefore the self, the existence of which has been asserted, is a unique characteristic, in as much that it is not as such the same as the body or the limbs, which have not been ascertained. Thus that which is ascertained i. However, Avicenna posited the brain as the place where reason interacts with sensation. Sensation prepares the soul to receive rational concepts from the universal Agent Intellect.

The first knowledge of the flying person would be "I am," affirming his or her essence. That essence could not be the body, obviously, as the flying person has no sensation. Thus, the knowledge that "I am" is the core of a human being: the soul exists and is self-aware. The body is unnecessary; in relation to it, the soul is its perfection.

It was used as the standard medical textbook in the Islamic world and Europe up to the 18th century. Avicenna considered whether events like rare diseases or disorders have natural causes. This view of medical phenomena anticipated developments in the Enlightenment by abu ali ibn sina biography samples centuries. Avicenna wrote on Earth sciences such as geology in The Book of Healing.

Either they are the effects of upheavals of the crust of the earth, such as might occur during a violent earthquake, or they are the effect of water, which, cutting itself a new route, has denuded the valleys, the strata being of different kinds, some soft, some hard It would require a long period of time for all such changes to be accomplished, during which the mountains themselves might be somewhat diminished in size.

In the Al-Burhan On Demonstration section of The Book of HealingAvicenna discussed the philosophy of science and described an early scientific method of inquiry. He discussed Aristotle's Posterior Analytics and significantly diverged from it on several points. Avicenna discussed the issue of a proper methodology for scientific inquiry and the question of "How does one acquire the first principles of a science?

Avicenna then added two further methods for arriving at the first principles : the ancient Aristotelian method of induction istiqraand the method of examination and experimentation tajriba. Avicenna criticized Aristotelian induction, arguing that "it does not lead to the absolute, universal, and certain premises that it purports to provide.

An early formal system of temporal logic was studied by Avicenna. He stated, "Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned. In mechanicsAvicenna, in The Book of Healingdeveloped a theory of motionin which he made a distinction between the inclination tendency to motion and force of a projectileand concluded that motion was a result of an inclination mayl transferred to the projectile by the thrower, and that projectile motion in a vacuum would not cease.

The theory of motion presented by Avicenna was probably influenced by the 6th-century Alexandrian scholar John Philoponus. Avicenna's is a less sophisticated variant of the theory of impetus developed by Buridan in the 14th century. It is unclear if Buridan was influenced by Avicenna, or by Philoponus directly. In opticsAvicenna was among those who argued that light had a speed, observing that "if the perception of light is due to the emission of some sort of particles by a luminous source, the speed of light must be finite.

Independent observation had demonstrated to him that the bow is not formed in the dark cloud but rather in the very thin mist lying between the cloud and the sun or observer. The cloud, he thought, serves as the background of this thin substance, much as a quicksilver lining is placed upon the rear surface of the glass in a mirror.

Ina Latin text entitled Speculum Tripartitum stated the following regarding Avicenna's theory on heat :. Avicenna says in his book of heaven and earth, that heat is generated from motion in external things. Avicenna's legacy in classical psychology is primarily embodied in the Kitab al-nafs parts of his Kitab al-shifa The Book of Healing and Kitab al-najat The Book of Deliverance.

These were known in Latin under the title De Anima treatises "on the soul". Avicenna's psychology requires that connection between the body and soul be strong enough to ensure the soul's individuation, but weak enough to allow for its immortality. Avicenna grounds his psychology on physiology, which means his account of the soul is one that deals almost entirely with the natural science of the body and its abilities of perception.

Thus, the philosopher's connection between the soul and body is explained almost entirely by his understanding of perception; in this way, bodily perception interrelates with the immaterial human intellect. In sense perception, the perceiver senses the form of the object; first, by perceiving features of the object by our external senses.

This sensory information is supplied to the internal senses, which merge all the pieces into a whole, unified conscious experience. This process of perception and abstraction is the nexus of the soul and body, for the material body may only perceive material objects, while the immaterial soul may only receive the immaterial, universal forms.

Retrieved January 09, from Encyclopedia. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. Abu 'Ali al-Husayn ibn Abdallah ibn Sina gale. Learn more about citation styles Citation styles Encyclopedia.

More From encyclopedia. Abtshuk, Avraham. Abtahi, Mohamed Ali —. Abt, Isaac Arthur. Abt, Franz Wilhelm. Abstract Representation. Abu 'L-Hasan Bani-Sadr —. Abu 'L-Hudhayl Al-? Allaf —C. Abu 'L-Qasem Kashani —