Thinker

Avicenna quotes

7 passages in English · 980–1037 · Islamic Philosophy.

Overview

Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, 980–1037) wrote The Healing and The Canon of Medicine, dominating Islamic and later Latin curricula. Born near Bukhara, he synthesized Aristotelian and Neoplatonic themes into a system centered on the Necessary Existent and an immortal rational soul. His ‘floating man’ thought experiment argues for self-awareness independent of bodily sensation.

Main ideas

Being divides into necessary and possible; God is the uncaused Necessary Existent. Complete knowledge of caused things requires knowledge through causes. The soul is a substance, not a body. Prophecy perfects intellect joined to a powerful imagination. Medicine studies bodily states in health and disease and the means of loss and restoration.

Major works

  • The Healing (al-Shifāʾ)
  • Pointers and Reminders
  • The Canon of Medicine
  • The Salvation

Legacy

Avicenna set the agenda for Islamic metaphysics and for scholastic psychology in Europe. Al-Ghazālī’s critique and Averroes’ reply both take his system as the philosophers’ paradigm.

Themes in this archive

Self (1) · God (1) · Knowledge (1) · Being (1) · Faith (1)

  1. Suppose a person were created at once, fully mature, but with sight veiled and limbs outstretched so that he touched nothing; he would affirm his own existence without affirming any body.
  2. The Necessary Existent has no cause; rather, It is the cause of all that is possible.
  3. The knowledge of anything that has causes is not complete unless it is known through its causes.
  4. The soul is a substance; it is not a body, nor is it impressed in a body as a form in matter in the way of bodily forms.
  5. The first of intelligibles is the grasp of existence; from it the mind proceeds to the necessary and the possible.
  6. Prophecy is a perfection of the human intellect joined to a power of imagination that receives and expresses what the intellect knows.
  7. Medicine is the science by which we learn the various states of the human body in health and when not in health, and the means by which health is likely to be lost and restored.