Avicenna

Avicenna in Arabic, Ibn Sina (980–1037), Islamic philosopher and physician. Born near Bukhara, where his father served as a provincial governor, Avicenna came to manhood as the Persian Samanid dynasty was crumbling and spent much of his life fleeing from court to court to avoid the clutches of the rapacious conqueror Mamhmad of Ghazna. His autobiography describes him as an intuitive student of philosophy and other Greek sciences who could not see the point of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, until he read a tiny essay by al-Farabi (870–950), who showed him what it means to seek the nature of being as such.
It was in metaphysics that Avicenna made his greatest contributions to philosophy, brilliantly synthesizing the rival approaches of the Aristotelian-Neoplatonic tradition with the creationist monotheism of Islamic dialectical theology (kalam). Where Aristotle sought and found being in its fullest sense in what was changeless in its nature (above all, in the species of things, the heavenly bodies, the cosmos as a whole), kalam understood being as the immediately given, allowing no inference beyond a single contingent datum to any necessary properties, correlatives, continuators, or successors. The result was a stringent atomist occasionalism resting ultimately on an early version of logical atomism. Avicenna preserved an Aristotelian naturalism alongside the Scriptural idea of the contingency of the world by arguing that any finite being is contingent in itself but necessary in relation to its causes. He adapted al-Farabi’s Neoplatonic emanationism to this schematization and naturalized in philosophy his own distinctive version of the kalam argument from contingency: any being must be either necessary or contingent, but if contingent, it requires a cause; since no infinite causal regress is possible, there must be a Necessary Being, which is therefore simple, the ultimate cause of all other things.
Avicenna found refuge at the court of one ‘Ala al-Dawla, who bravely resisted the military pressures of Mahmud against his lands around Isfahan and made the philosopher and savant his vizier. Here Avicenna completed his famous philosophic work the Shifa’ (known in Latin as the Sufficientia) and his Qanun fi Tibb, the Galenic Canon, which remained in use as a medical textbook until finally brought down by the weight of criticisms during the Renaissance. Avicenna’s philosophy was the central target of the polemical critique of the Muslim theologian al-Ghazali (1058–1111) in his Incoherence of the Philosophers, mainly on the grounds that the philosopher’s retention of the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the world was inconsistent with his claim that God was the author of the world. Avicenna’s related affirmations of the necessity of causation and universality of God’s knowledge, al-Ghazali argued, made miracles impossible and divine governance too impersonal to deserve the name. Yet Avicenna’s philosophic works (numbering over a hundred in their Arabic and sometimes Persian originals) continued to exercise a major influence on Muslim and Jewish philosophers and (through Latin translations) on philosophers in the West. See also ARABIC PHILOSOPHY. L.E.G.

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