Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna, was born on August 23, 980, in Afshona, Persia, in what is today Uzbekistan. He rose to become the most celebrated physician and philosopher of the Islamic world, bringing together the Greek philosophic thought of late antiquity and that of early Islam into a scientific system that addressed essentially every aspect of reality, including religion. Not only did Avicenna’s work dominate thought in the Islamic world for centuries, after its translation into Latin in the twelfth century, it exerted a great influence on medieval and early Renaissance philosophy. The Latin translation of Avicenna’s medical treatises had a similarly powerful influence on European medicine as late as the seventeenth century.
Avicenna composed an autobiography, in which he reported having committed the Quran to memory by the time he was ten years old. An Indian grocer in his village taught him Indian arithmetic, and he took lessons from an itinerant scholar, who also practiced medicine. From another scholar, he learned the fundamentals of Islamic jurisprudence. He struggled with the Metaphysics of Aristotle until its secrets were unlocked for him by a reading of Abu Nasr al-Farabi’s commentary. At sixteen, he studied medicine and was deemed a fully qualified physician by his eighteenth year. He excelled in medicine and earned widespread fame, eventually earning appointment as physician to Emir Nuh II, who, in gratitude for helping him to recover from a serious illness, rewarded him with access to the royal library of the Samanids.
When he was twenty-two, Avicenna lost his father and traveled to Urgench in what is now Turkmenistan, where the local vizier subsidized his study. In search of a more remunerative patron, Avicenna wandered as far as Tabaristan in today’s northern Iran. There he hoped that the local ruler, Qabus, renowned as a patron of the learned, would give him a place. But he discovered that Qabus had been starved to death by mutinous troops. Avicenna himself fell ill, but finally found shelter and a patron at Hyrcania, near the Caspian Sea. Here he lectured on logic and astronomy and wrote his great Canon of Medicine.
Avicenna moved on to Rayy, near modern Tehran, and was highly productive there under the sponsorship of Majd al-Damla, Rayy’s young emir. But he soon became embroiled in internecine disputes and was caught in a war between the cities of Hamadan and Isfahan. He had to hide, flee, and hide some more. He was even imprisoned for a time. Nevertheless, he continued to study and write and served several local rulers as physician, political counselor, and philosopher-scientist. He settled about 1025 in Isfahan, where he spent the remainder of his life once again in service to Ala al-Dawla as physician, adviser, and philosopher-inresidence. He died in June 1037.
Fairly late in his life, Avicenna wrote an Autobiography, in which he accounted for his development as a philosopher. He set out, he says, to comprehend the structure of all knowledge. He began devouring the works of previous philosophers, whom he read with a critical eye and with the intention of correcting their shortcomings. His readings convinced him that philosophy—by which he meant the state of all knowledge—needed to be revised and elevated. Finally, he explained his belief that the individual could acquire the highest knowledge by comprehensive study of epistemology and eschatology, a project he did not merely intend to accomplish but claimed to have mastered by the time he was eighteen. Reportedly, he wrote his mature masterwork (composed 1014-1020), The Cure, without consulting any books.
Monumental in scope, The Cure (al-Shifa, sometimes translated as The Book of Healing) runs to some 22 volumes in the twentieth-century “Cairo edition.” It encompasses logic, theoretical philosophy, and practical philosophy.
The logical material is a series of commentaries, beginning with the Isagoge, an introduction to Aristotle’s “Categories” (the things that can be the subject or predicate of a logical proposition) written by the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry. Avicenna went on to comment on, criticize, and extend all of Aristotle’s major works of logic, dialectic, rhetoric, and poetics.
Under the category of theoretical philosophy, Avicenna wrote on Aristotelian concepts of physics, on mathematics (based on works by Euclid, Ptolemy, and others), and on metaphysics. In this category, Avicenna explored the varied phenomena of religious life and what we might call the paranormal as functions of the “rational soul.” Thus, Avicenna’s metaphysics served as the core of his moral and ethical philosophy.
In the area of practical philosophy, The Cure treats the role of prophetic legislation in guiding politics. Here Avicenna elaborated on the political works of both Plato and Aristotle to describe the ideal legislator for public administration and for “family law.” The section ends with a work on ethics, drawing heavily on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Avicenna envisioned ethics as a field to be legislated by a caliph.
Avicenna’s achievement was to synthesize all the philosophical thought he had absorbed, both Hellenic and Islamic, into a coherent rational system capable of explaining reality and ultimately driving a rational and just system of ethics. In this, he sought to harmonize Aristotelian physics and metaphysics with Neoplatonism set within the context of a cosmology as imagined by Ptolemy. In sum, Avicenna can be said to have charted the intellectual civilization of the medieval world, both in its Islamic and Christian aspects.
