Avicenna (Great Medieval Thinkers)

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.

Politics & Social Sciences

McGinnis, Jon

Philosophy

Oxford University Press

In the 13th, century many of the Latin doctrines of the soul, intellect and perception were heavily influenced by Arabic sources, Avicenna and Averroes being the most significant ones. Their reading of Aristotle's De anima stresses either a more or less Neoplatonic conceptual framework or a return to the purported Peripatetic roots. This volume deals with the generation and transmission of the Aristotelian science of the soul from Arabic into Latin and, incidentally, into Hebrew. It becomes clear that Latin discussions, such as in Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas or Roger Bacon and John Duns Scotus, should be thought of as the result of the either affirmative incorporation and transformation of the Arabic-Aristotelian tradition or its rejection. The articles gathered in this volume showcase various facets of the Arabic and Latin philosophical psychology ranging from the Avicennian theories of vision, cogitation and musical awareness to Averroes's relevance for a proper understanding of Aquinas's early theory of the intellect as well as the structure of animal knowledge according to Albert the Great and Roger Bacon. Even though rooted in different theological and philosophical traditions, it is clear that the Arabic and Latin theories of the soul use a common Aristotelian language.

Philosophical Psychology in Arabic Thought and the Latin Aristotelianism of the 13 th Century (Sic Et Non) (English and French Edition)

Bazán, Bernardo Carlos

Black, Deborah

Brenet, Jean-Baptiste

Druart, Marie-Thérèse

Fidora, Alexander

Hackett, Jeremiah

López-Farjeat, Luis Xavier

Taylor, Richard C.

Tellkamp, Jörg Alejandro

Vrin

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