Ibn sina religion

Avicenna died
Ibn sina cause of death
Ibn sina family

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Philosophers of the Islamic world enjoyed thought experiments. If the heavens vanished, they wondered, would time continue to pass? If existence were distinct from essence, would that mean that existence itself must exist? Can God turn your household servant into a horse, so that you come back home to find it has urinated all over your books?

But the most famous is the so-called ‘flying man’ thought experiment, devised by the most influential philosopher of the Islamic world, Avicenna (in Arabic, Ibn Sīnā, who lived from 980 to 1037 CE). Imagine, he says, that a person is created by God in mid-air, in good condition but with his sight veiled and his limbs outstretched so that he is touching nothing, not even his own body. This person has no memories, having only just been created. Will his mind be a blank, devoid as it is of past or present sensory experience? No, says Avicenna. He will be aware of his own existence.

Three questions immediately arise. First, when Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978), imagined a whale popping into existence

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Ibn Sina [Avicenna]

1. Life and Works

1.1 Life

At some point in his later years, Avicenna wrote for or dictated to his student, companion, and amanuensis, Abū-ʿUbayd al-Jūzjānī, his Autobiography, reaching till the time in his middle years when they first met; al-Jūzjānī continued the biography after that point and completed it some time after the master’s death in 1037 AD. This auto-/biographical complex, which also contains bibliographies and has been transmitted as a single document (Gohlman 1974), is an early representative of an Arabic literary genre much cultivated by scientists and scholars in medieval Islam (Gutas 2015). It is also our most extensive source about Avicenna’s life and times. According to this document, Avicenna was born in Afshana, a village in the outskirts of metropolitan Bukhara, some time in the 70s of the tenth century, perhaps as early as 964; it has not been possible to determine the year of his birth with greater precision.^[3] His father, originally from Balkh farther to the southeast who had

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141 - Into Thin Air: Avicenna on the Soul

• P. Adamson, “Correcting Plotinus: Soul’s Relationship to Body in Avicenna’s Commentary on the Theology of Aristotle”, in P. Adamson et al. (eds), Philosophy, Science and Exegesis in Greek, Arabic and Latin Commentaries (London: 2004), vol. 2, 59-75.

• P. Adamson and F. Benevich, “The Thought Experimental Method: Avicenna’s Flying Man Argument,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association (2018), 1-18.

• T. Alpina, Subject, Definition, Activity: Framing Avicenna’s Science of the Soul (Paris: 2021).

• D.L. Black, “Estimation in Avicenna: The Logical and Psychological Dimensions,” Dialogue 32 (1993): 219–58.

• D.L. Black, “Avicenna on Self-Awareness and Knowing that One Knows,” in S. Rahman et al. (eds), The Unity of Science in the Arabic Tradition (Dordrecht: 2008), 63-87.

• T.-A. Druart, “The Human Soul’s Individuation and its Survival After the Body’s Death: Avicenna on the Causal Relation Between Body and Soul,” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 10 (2000), 259-273.

• D.N. Hasse, Avicenna’s De Anima in the Latin