Avicenna's Metaphysics in Context

Avicenna's Metaphysics in Context
Author: Robert Wisnovsky
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2018-05-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1501711520

The eleventh-century philosopher and physician Abu Ali ibn Sina (d. A.D. 1037) was known in the West by his Latinized name Avicenna. An analysis of the sources and evolution of Avicenna's metaphysics, this book focuses on the answers he and his predecessors gave to two fundamental pairs of questions: what is the soul and how does it cause the body; and what is God and how does He cause the world? To respond to these challenges, Avicenna invented new concepts and distinctions and reinterpreted old ones. The author concludes that Avicenna's innovations are a turning point in the history of metaphysics. Avicenna's metaphysics is the culmination of a period of synthesis during which philosophers fused together a Neoplatonic project (reconciling Plato with Aristotle) with a Peripatetic project (reconciling Aristotle with himself). Avicenna also stands at the beginning of a period during which philosophers sought to integrate the Arabic version of the earlier synthesis with Islamic doctrinal theology (kalam). Avicenna's metaphysics significantly influenced European scholastic thought, but it had an even more profound impact on Islamic intellectual history—the philosophical problems and opportunities associated with the Avicennian synthesis continued to be debated up to the end of the nineteenth century.

Talking about God and Talking about Creation

Talking about God and Talking about Creation
Author: Rahim Acar
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2021-08-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9047415922

This study compares Avicenna’s and Thomas Aquinas’ conceptions of God, theological language, the nature of creative action and the beginning of the universe. It emphasizes the connection between their positions regarding theological language and their discussions of creation.

Chance and Determinism in Avicenna and Averroes

Chance and Determinism in Avicenna and Averroes
Author: Catarina Belo
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2007-02-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9047419154

This book examines the question whether medieval Muslim philosophers Avicenna (Arabic Ibn Sīnā 980-1037) and Averroes (Arabic Ibn Rushd 1126-1198) are determinists. With a focus on physics and metaphysics it studies their views on chance events in nature, as well as matter, in particular prime matter, and divine providence. In addition it sets their positions against the historical/philosophical background that influenced their response, the Greco-Arabic philosophical tradition - Aristotelian and Neoplatonic - on the one hand, and the tradition of Islamic theology (kalām) on the other. In comparing their philosophical systems, it lays emphasis on the way in which Avicenna and Averroes use these traditions to offer an original answer to the problem of determinism.

The Poetics of Alfarabi and Avicenna

The Poetics of Alfarabi and Avicenna
Author: Salim Kemal
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 296
Release: 1991
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9789004093713

This book is an original and important study of philosophical issues in medieval Arabic poetics. Examining the commentaries on Aristotle's "Poetics by Avicenna" in the context of Aristotle's logical theory, the author shows how the philosophers justified the logical and moral power of poetic discourse.

Arabic Theology, Arabic Philosophy

Arabic Theology, Arabic Philosophy
Author: Richard M. Frank
Publisher: Peeters Publishers
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789042917781

In the course of his career, Professor Richard M. Frank of the Catholic University of America produced a hugely significant corpus of works on the intellectual activity in Classical Islam known as Kalam, which he argued should be rendered as 'speculative theology'. He also wrote on the Qur'an, on the Arabic and Syriac philosophical tradition, and argued vigorously for a new reading of the famous religious scholar and theologian al-Ghazali (d. 1111) as a devotee of the cosmology of Ibn Sina (d. 1037). In this volume, fourteen scholars, many of them contemporaries of Professor Frank, engage with his legacy with important and seminal works which take some of his ideas as their points of departure. The book is divided into six sections: the Qur'an, Paths to al-Ash'ari, Al-Ash'ari and the Kalam, Christian Falsafa, Avicenna and Beyond, and Al-Ghazali on Causality. There are major articles on Qur'anic emendations and Arabia and Late Antiquity, on the Arabic Plotinian Tradition, on Syriac Philosophical Vocabulary, and an important reading of the Greek-Arabic translation movement in terms of the practical and exact sciences. There are seminal studies of atomism, with valuable translations of complex theological passages previously untranslated, of the Christian philosophy of Yahya ibn 'Adi, of a late Mu'tazili argument for the existence of God and a hitherto unedited section on optics by Ibn Mattawayh. These are complemented by important, close readings of Avicenna's epistemology and his Metaphysics together with a major, new survey of the Avicennan tradition in the madrasas of the Islamic East. The volume ends with two discussions of the perennial question of al-Ghazali's theory of causality. In addition, the volume contains an autobiographical piece by Professor Frank and a complete bibliography of his published works.

Interpreting Avicenna

Interpreting Avicenna
Author: Peter Adamson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2013-07-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0521190738

This volume examines many aspects of the philosophy of Avicenna, the greatest philosopher of the Islamic world.

Avicenna

Avicenna
Author: Jon McGinnis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2010-06-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199715963

Ibn Sina (980-1037), known as Avicenna in Latin, played a considerable role in the development of both Eastern and Western philosophy and science. His contributions to the fields of logic, natural science, psychology, metaphysics, theology, and even medicine were vast. His work was to have a significant impact on Thomas Aquinas, among others, who explicitly and frequently drew upon the ideas of his Muslim predecessor. Avicenna also affected the thinking of the great Islamic theologian al-Ghazali, who asserted that if one could show the incoherence of Avicenna's thought, then one would have demonstrated the incoherence of philosophy in general. But Avicenna's influence is not confined to the medieval period. His logic, natural philosophy, and metaphysics are still taught in the Islamic world as living philosophy, and many contemporary Catholic and evangelical Christian philosophers continue to encounter his ideas through Aquinas's work. Using a small handful of novel insights, Avicenna not only was able to address a host of issues that had troubled earlier philosophers in both the ancient Hellenistic and medieval Islamic worlds, but also fundamentally changed the direction of philosophy, in the Islamic East as well as in Jewish and Christian milieus. Despite Avicenna's important place in the history of ideas, there has been no single volume that both recognizes the complete range of his intellectual activity and provides a rigorous analysis of his philosophical thinking. This book fills that need. In Avicenna Jon McGinnis provides a general introduction to the thinker's intellectual system and offers a careful philosophical analysis of major aspects of his work in clear prose that will be accessible to students as well as to specialists in Islamic studies, philosophy, and the history of science.

Avicenna on the Ontology of Pure Quiddity

Avicenna on the Ontology of Pure Quiddity
Author: Damien Janos
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 774
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3110652080

This study focuses on the metaphysics of the great Arabic philosopher Avicenna (or Ibn Sīnā, d. 1037 C.E.). More specifically, it delves into Avicenna’s theory of quiddity or essence, a topic which seized the attention of thinkers both during the medieval and modern periods. Building on recent contributions in Avicennian studies, this book proposes a new and comprehensive interpretation of Avicenna’s theory of ‘the pure quiddity’ (also known as ‘the quiddity in itself’) and of its ontology. The study provides a careful philological analysis of key passages gleaned from the primary sources in Arabic and a close philosophical contextualization of Avicenna’s doctrines in light of the legacy of ancient Greek philosophy in Islam and the early development of Arabic philosophy (falsafah) and theology (kalām). The study pays particular attention to how Avicenna’s theory of quiddity relates to the ancient Greek philosophical discussion about the universals or common things and Mu’tazilite ontology. Its main thesis is that Avicenna articulated a sophisticated doctrine of the ontology of essence in light of Greek and Bahshamite sources, which decisively shaped subsequent intellectual history in Islam and the Latin West.

Before and After Avicenna

Before and After Avicenna
Author: Avicenna Study Group. Conference
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2003-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9789004129788

This collection of papers addresses a variety of aspects of the life and thought of the medieval philosopher Avicenna including his reception of Classical philosophy, his views on topics such as metaphysics, psychology and medicine, and the recpeption of his thought by later authors.