Abstract
In this chapter we will discuss perhaps the most famous of all the philosophers of the Islamic world: Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn Sīnā or Avicenna (as he was called by the Latin-speaking scholastics). I will present Avicenna as taking on the same spirit of doing philosophy as does al-Farabi but as being even more explicit about presenting his theories as original theories that depart from Aristotle—in his view for the better and, again in his view, in a way that vindicates the truth of Islam. His innovations have turned out to be very influential, and we see in his work some of the very first explicit accounts of how philosophical thought experiments come to have probative force, packaged together with a metaphysics of modality, and possibly the very first philosophical account of self-consciousness. We will discuss all of these after first having had a brief look at the historical context in which he worked.
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Notes
- 1.
Though like al-Kindi he also follows the Peripatetic and Neo-Platonist tradition of writing commentaries on the works of Plato and Aristotle .
- 2.
In Avicenna’s Autobiography.
- 3.
Reisman (2013).
- 4.
For example see the prominence of Avicenna (Ibn Sina ) in the curriculum at the department of Islamic philosophy of Ankara University: http://divinity.en.ankara.edu.tr/?page_id=449
- 5.
Hintikka (1973). Hintikka also calls this the “principle of plenitude”.
- 6.
The more modern view that is rather de rigueur in analytic philosophy involves thinking about “possible worlds”: some object (or some state of affairs) exists necessarily if it exists (or obtains) in all possible worlds, or at least all the close possible worlds (worlds that resemble our world); something is possible if it exists (or obtains) in at least some close possible worlds and something is impossible if it exists (or obtains) in none of them (cf. Lewis 1973).
- 7.
Adamson (2016, chapter 17).
- 8.
Conway (1984) for discussion.
- 9.
Since essence and accident look also like modal properties, the definition is not going to be fully non-circular, a point which Avicenna takes on the chin: “It may also prove difficult for us to make known the state of the necessary, the possible, the impossible through ascertained definition, and we would have to make this known only through a sign” (Metaphysics 1.5 22.32–34) and “none of these things can be shown by proof totally devoid of circularity or by the expression of better known things”(Metaphysics 1.5 15.18–19).
- 10.
The famous Dutch philosopher Spinoza seems to use this argument for the existence of God too. For discussion see Douglas (2015, chapter 3).
- 11.
Named after the famous philosopher/logician Ruth Barcan Marcus (1921–2012).
- 12.
In particular , see Williamson (2015) who characterizes the proponent on the view as claiming: “The pieces of the puzzle are given, however they are rearranged” (2015, p. 1).
- 13.
See Adamson (2005) for an excellent account of this.
- 14.
Though Avicenna seems to think that this faculty is not available to everyone.
- 15.
As Dag Hasse puts it: “Avicenna appears to combine two incompatible concepts in one doctrine: either the intelligible forms emanate from above or they are abstracted from the data collected by the senses, but not both” Hasse (2001, p. 39). I hope to have shown how Avicenna was successful in doing so.
- 16.
For discussion see McGinnis (2010, chapter 8).
- 17.
As Herbert Davidson puts it: “Avicenna likewise recognizes, and attaches the name prophecy to, knowledge that results when the emanation from the active intellect—or another supernal being—acts on the human imaginative faculty. But as an extension of his view that man receives intelligible thought directly from an emanation of the active intellect , he, unlike Al-Farabi , recognises, and names as prophecy, genuine theoretical knowledge imparted by the active intellect to the human intellect without the human intellect’s having to employ standard scientific procedures” (Davidson 1992, p. 117). Fazlur Rahman makes the distinction by calling revelation of new knowledge “intellectual revelation” and revelation bringing understanding to existing knowledge “imaginative revelation” (Rahman 1958, p. 36).
- 18.
For a modern defence of priority monism, see Schaffer (2010). His is a secular version of the thesis, according to which the one truthmaker is the world taken as a whole.
- 19.
In his 1637 Discourse on Method.
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Booth, A.R. (2017). Avicenna and the Modality of the World. In: Analytic Islamic Philosophy. Palgrave Philosophy Today. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54157-4_5
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