Avicenna - Avicenna

Of all the philosophers in the West, none, perhaps, is better known by name and less familiar in the actual content of his ideas than the medieval Muslim philosopher, physician, princely minister and naturalist, Abu Ali Ibn Sina, known since the days of the scholastics as Avicenna. In this lucid and witty book, Lenn E. Goodman, himself a philosopher, and long known for his studies of Arabic thought, presents a factual, pithy and engaging account of Avicennas philosophy. Setting the thinker in the context of his often turbulent times and tracing the roots and influences of Avicennas ideas, Goodman offers a factual and credible philosophical portrait of one of the worlds greatest metaphysicians.

This book details Avicennas account of being as a synthesis between the seemingly irreconcilable extremes of Aristotelian eternalism and the creationism of monotheistic scripture. It examines Avicennas distinctive theory of knowledge, his ideas about immortality and individuality, including the famous Floating Man argument, his contributions to logic, and his probing thoughts on rhetoric and poetics Taking advantage of the latest scholarship, Goodmans book is more than a philosophical appreciation. In every section, it considers the abiding value of Avicennas contributions, assaying his thought against the responses of his contemporaries and successors but also against our current philosophical understanding.

Avicenna will have considerable appeal for all Arabists and Islamicists and also students and scholars of philosophy.

L. E. Goodman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii.

This new series is designed to provide straightforward introductions for the western reader to some of the major figures and movements of Arabic thought. Philosophers, historians, and geographers are all seminal figures in the history of thought, and some names, such as Averroes and Avicenna, are already part of the western tradition. Mathematicians, linguistic theorists, and astronomers have as significant a part to play as groups of thinkers such as the Illuminationists. With the growing importance of the Arab world on the international scene, these succinct and authoritative works will be welcomed not only by teachers and students of Arab history and of philosophy, but by journalists, travellers, teachers of English as a second language, and business people in fact any who have to come to an understanding of this non-western culture in the course of their daily work.

Also available in this series:

AL-FRB Ian Richard Netton

IBN KHALDUN AzizAl-Azmeh

IBN RUSHD (Averroes) Dominique Urvoy

MOSES MAIMONIDES Oliver Leaman

THE ARABIC LINGUISTIC TRADITION

Georges Bohas,Jean-Patrick Guillaume, Djamel Eddine Kouloughli

THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE IN ISLAM Franz Rosenthal

Forthcoming:

IBN ARABI Ronald Nettler

NAGUIB MAHFOUZ Rasheed El-Enany

First published 1992

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Transferred to Digital Printing 2005

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

a division ofRoutledge, Chapman and Hall Inc.

270 MadisonAve, NewYork NY 10016

1992 Lenn E. Goodman

Typeset in 10 on 12 point Bembo by

Leaper & Gard Ltd, Bristol, England

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Goodman, L.E. (Lenn Evan)

Avicenna. (Arabic thought and culture)

I. Title II. Series

181.5

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Goodman, Lenn Evan

Avicenna/Lenn E. Goodman.

p. cm. (Arabic thought and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Avicenna, 9801037. I. Title. II. Series.

B751.27G66 1992

181.5dc20 9140142

ISBN: 0-415-01929-X (ebk)

ISBN: 0-415-07409-6 (pbk)

The name of Avicenna is well known in the west. His ideas, less so. Many readers of philosophy know that philosophical inquiry and exploration were nourished and sustained in Arabic and Hebrew texts and discussions during the long period between the closure of Platos Academy a thousand years after the birth of Socrates and the first light of the Renaissance, sparked in part by translations of philosophical works from Arabic into Latin in late twelfth-century Toledo. But few are aware of the exact nature of the philosophical contributions, if any, of the Arabs. Fewer still, even among specialists in philosophy and philosophical history, are aware of the abiding philosophical interest of the ideas and arguments of the great Muslim and Jewish philosophers who wrote in Arabic, of whom, at least in the area of metaphysics, Avicenna was the outstanding example.

The great names in the Islamic philosophical tradition, which flourished in the ninth to fourteenth centuries, are al-Kind (c. 80166), al-Rz (d. 925 or 932), al-Frb (c. 870950), Ibn Miskawayh (9361030), Avicenna (9801037), al-Ghazl (10581111), Ibn Tfayl (c. 11001185), Ibn Rushd (11261198), and Ibn Khaldun (13321406). AlKind was an Arab nobleman and physician, patron of translations from Greek into Arabic and ardent advocate of openness to truth, regardless of its source. Al-Rz was a Persian physician, participant in and critic of the Galenic tradition of medicine, iconoclastic cosmologist, and mildly ascetic Epicurean, who denied that any man had privileged access to intelligence, whether by nature or from God. Ibn Miskawayh was a Persian courtier, historian, and ethicist who naturalized Greek virtue ethics against the background of the command ethics of the Qurn.

Al-Frb was a logician and theorist of language and politics. Of Turkic origin, he championed the underlying harmony of Plato and Aristotle and saw the Qurn as the poetic expression of truths known more directly through the insights of philosophers. He viewed all religions as imaginative projections, translating into norms and symbols the pure ideas that flow into the prepared intelligence of the inquirer from the supernal hypostasis known as the Active Intellect. Al-Ghazl was an Eastern Persian theologian whose critical thinking brought him to a state of crisis that provoked him to flee the political instability and intellectual disorder brought about in his times by sectarianism and philosophy respectively. He found shelter and spiritual security in Sufism, rebuilding his faith through mystic praxis. Writing from the vantage point of his rebuilt faith, he exposed the inner tensions of the Islamic philosophical synthesis in his famous work, The Incoherence of the Philosophers.

Ibn Tufayl, a Spanish Arab, worked to rebuild that synthesis, through a philosophical fable, the tale of a child growing up in isolation on an equatorial island and discovering for himself the truths that underlie the symbols of the Quran truths that would reconcile the insights of al-Ghazl with those of the Philosophers. Ibn Rushd (Averroes), a jurist and physician as well as a philosopher, was the scion of a long line of Arab gds at Cordova. Introduced to the Sultan by Ibn Tufayl, he was commissioned to write his extensive and faithful commentaries on the works of Aristotle. Struggling to defend the status and define the standing of philosophy in the Islamic milieu, he took up the challenge of al-Ghazl, in his defense of the philosophic tradition,