Philosopher and physician, born near Bokhara, SW Uzbekistan. Renowned for his learning, he became physician to several sultans, and for some time vizier in Hamadan, Persia. He was one of the main interpreters of Aristotle to the Islamic world, and the author of some 200 works on science, religion, and philosophy. His medical textbook, Canon of Medicine, long remained a standard work.
|
Persian scholar Medieval era |
|
|---|---|
| Name: | Abu Ali Sina |
| Birth: | 980 CE / 370 AH |
| Death: | 1037 CE / 428 AH |
| School/tradition: |
Mu'tazili |
| Main interests: | Metaphysics, logic, ethics, medicine, physics, mathematics, astronomy, theology |
| Notable ideas: | The works of Avicenna were long used in European medical education |
| Influences: | Aristotle, Neoplatonism, al-Farabi |
| Influenced: | Ibn Rushd |
Abū ‘Alī al-Husayn ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā al-Balkhī (Persian ابوعلى سينا Abu Ali Sina or arabisized: أبو علي الحسين بن عبد الله بن سينا;
He was born in 980 CE/ 370 AH in Afshana near Bukhara (then Persia, now in Uzbekistan) and died in 1037 CE/428 AH) in Hamadan, Persia (Iran).
He was the author of 450 books on a wide range of subjects, many of which concentrated on philosophy and medicine. His most famous works are The Book of Healing and The Canon of Medicine, which was for seven centuries, the standard medical text in European universities.
Early life
His life is known to us from authoritative sources.
He was born in around 370 (AH) / 980 (AD) in Afshana, his mother's home, a small city now part of Uzbekistan (then part of Persia). His father, a respected Ismaili scholar, was from Balkh of Khorasan, now part of Afghanistan (then also Persia) and was at the time of his son's birth the governor of a village in one of Nuh ibn Mansur's estates. Traditionally of the Ismaili Shia branch of Islam, Ibn Sina's independent thought was served by an extraordinary intelligence and memory, which allowed him to overtake his teachers at the age of fourteen.
Ibn Sina was put under the charge of a tutor, and his precocity soon made him the marvel of his neighbours;
However he was greatly troubled by metaphysical problems and in particular the works of Aristotle.
He turned to medicine at 16, and not only learned medical theory, but by gratuitous attendance on the sick had, according to his own account, discovered new methods of treatment.
His first appointment was that of physician to the emir, who owed him his recovery from a dangerous illness (997). Ibn Sina's chief reward for this service was access to the royal library of the Samanids, well-known patrons of scholarship and scholars. When the library was destroyed by fire not long after, the enemies of Ibn Sina accused him of burning it, in order for ever to conceal the sources of his knowledge. Meanwhile, he assisted his father in his financial labours, but still found time to write some of his earliest works.
When Ibn Sina was 22 years old, he lost his father. Ibn Sina seems to have declined the offers of Mahmud of Ghazni, and proceeded westwards to Urgench in the modern Uzbekistan, where the vizier, regarded as a friend of scholars, gave him a small monthly stipend. The pay was small, however, so Ibn Sina wandered from place to place through the districts of Nishapur and Merv to the borders of Khorasan, seeking an opening for his talents. Shams al-Ma'äli Qäbtis, the generous ruler of Dailam, himself a poet and a scholar, with whom Ibn Sina had expected to find an asylum, was about that date (1052) starved to death by his troops who had revolted. Ibn Sina himself was at this season stricken down by a severe illness. Finally, at Gorgan, near the Caspian Sea, Ibn Sina met with a friend, who bought a dwelling near his own house in which Ibn Sina lectured on logic and astronomy. Several of Ibn Sina's treatises were written for this patron;
Ibn Sina subsequently settled at Rai, in the vicinity of modern Tehran, (present day capital of Iran), the home town of Rhazes; At Rai about thirty of Ibn Sina's shorter works are said to have been composed. At first, Ibn Sina entered into the service of a high-born lady; Ibn Sina was even raised to the office of vizier. Ibn Sina, however, remained hidden for forty days in a sheikh's house, till a fresh attack of illness induced the emir to restore him to his post. Even during this perturbed time, Ibn Sina persevered with his studies and teaching. On the death of the emir, Ibn Sina ceased to be vizier and hid himself in the house of an apothecary, where, with intense assiduity, he continued the composition of his works.
Meanwhile, he had written to Abu Ya'far, the prefect of the dynamic city of Isfahan, offering his services. The new emir of Hamadan, hearing of this correspondence and discovering where Ibn Sina was hidden, incarcerated him in a fortress. When the storm had passed, Ibn Sina returned with the emir to Hamadan, and carried on his literary labours. Later, however, accompanied by his brother, a favourite pupil, and two slaves, Ibn Sina escaped out of the city in the dress of a Sufite ascetic.
Later life
The remaining ten or twelve years of Avicenna's life were spent in the service of Abu Ya'far 'Ala Addaula, whom he accompanied as physician and general literary and scientific adviser, even in his numerous campaigns.
During these years he began to study literary matters and philology, instigated, it is asserted, by criticisms on his style. A severe colic, which seized him on the march of the army against Hamadãn, was checked by remedies so violent that Ibn Sina could scarcely stand.
His friends advised him to slow down and take life moderately.
Works
Scarcely any member of the Arabian circle of the sciences, including theology, philology, mathematics, astronomy, physics, and music, was left untouched by the treatises of Ibn Sina. This vast quantity of works - be they full-blown treatises or opusculae - vary so much in style and content (if one were to compare between the 'ahd made with his disciple Bahmanyar to uphold philosophical integrity with the Provenance and Direction, for example) that Yahya (formerly Jean) Michot justifiably accused him of "neurological bipolarity". His Logic, Metaphysics, Physics, and De Caelo, are treatises giving a synoptic view of Aristotelian doctrine, though the Metaphysics demonstrates a significant departure from the brand of Neoplatonism known as Aristotelianism in Avicenna's world; Arabic philosophers have hinted at the idea that Avicenna was attempting to "re-Aristotelianise" Arabic philosophy in its entirety, unlike his predecessors, who accepted the conflation of Platonic, Aristotelian, Neo- and Middle-Platonic works transmitted into the Arabic world. part of it on the De Anima appeared at Pavia (1490) as the Liber Sextus Naturalium, and the long account of Ibn Sina's philosophy given by Muhammad al-Shahrastani seems to be mainly an analysis, and in many places a reproduction, of the Al-Shifa'.
Medicine
About 100 treatises were ascribed to Ibn Sina. The best-known amongst them, and that to which Ibn Sina owed his European reputation, is his 14-volume The Canon of Medicine, which was a standard medical text in Western Europe for seven centuries.
It was mainly accident which determined that from the 12th to the 17th century Ibn Sina should be the guide of medical study in European universities, and eclipse the names of Rhazes, Ali ibn al-Abbas and Averroes. His work is not essentially different from that of his predecessor Rhazes, because he presented the doctrine of Galen, and through Galen the doctrine of Hippocrates, modified by the system of Aristotle.
In the museum at Bukhara, there are displays showing many of his writings, surgical instruments from the period and paintings of patients undergoing treatment.
Ibn Sina was interested in the effect of the mind on the body, and wrote a great deal on psychology, likely influencing Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Bajjah.
Philosophy
Ibn Sina wrote extensively on the subjects of philosophy, logic, ethics, metaphysics and other disciplines. Most of his works were written in Arabic - which was the de facto scientific language of that time, and some were written in the Persian language. Of linguistic significance even to this day are a few books that he wrote in nearly pure Persian language (particularly the Danishnamah-yi 'Ala', Philosophy for Ala' ad-Dawla'). Ibn Sina's commentaries on Aristotle often corrected the philosopher, encouraging a lively debate in the spirit of ijtihad.
Ibn Sina's philosophical tenets have become of great interest to critical Western scholarship and to those engaged in the field of Arabic philosophy, in both the West and the East. The original work, entitled the Easterners (al-mashriqiyun), was probably lost during Avicenna's lifetime; Ibn Tufayl dishonestly appended it to a romantic philosophical work of his own in the twelfth century, the Hayy b. Yaqzan, in order to validate his shaky philosophical system, and, by the time that the work was transmitted into the West, appended as it was to a set of "mystical" opusculae and sundry essays, it was firmly accepted as a demonstration of Avicenna's "esoteric" orientation, which he concealed out of necessity from his peers. Such interpretations of Avicenna's "true" state of mind ignore the vast corpus of work that he produced, from major treatises to slurs on his enemies and rivals, misrepresent him utterly. It also regrettably detracts attention from the fact that Arabic philosophy flourished during the ten centuries after Avicenna's death, emerging from Avicenna's inflammatory pronouncements on all matters within the world, whether physical or metaphysical;
Metaphysical doctrine
Islamic philosophy, imbued as it is with theology, distinguishes more clearly than Aristotelianism the difference between essence and existence. However, Avicenna's commentaries upon the Metaphysics in particular demonstrate that he was much more clearly aligned with a philosophical comprehension of the metaphysical world rather than one that was grounded in theology. The philosophy of Avicenna, particularly that part relating to metaphysics, owes much to Aristotle and to Al-Farabi. The search for a truly definitive Islamic philosophy can be seen in what is left to us of his work.
God as the first cause of all things
For Avicenna, essence is non-contingent.
This view has a profound impact on the monotheistic concept of creation. Existence is not seen by Avicenna as the work of a capricious deity, but of a divine, self-causing thought process.
Avicenna found inspiration for this methaphysical view in the works of Al-Farabi, but his innovation is in his account a single and necessary first cause of all existence.
The Ten Intellects
In Avicenna's account of creation (largely derived from Al-Farabi), from this first cause (or First Intellect) proceeds the creation of the material world.
The First Intellect, in contemplating the necessity of its existence, gives rise to the Second Intellect.
This triple-contemplation establishes the first stages of existence.
The angels created by each of the next seven Intellects are associated with a different body in the Sphere of the Planets.
This Ninth Intellect occurs at a step so removed from the First Intellect that the emanation that then arises from it explodes into fragments, creating not a further celestial entity, but instead creating human souls, which have the sensory functions lacked by the Angels of Magnificence.
The Angel and the minds of humans
For Avicenna, human minds were not in themselves formed for abstract thought.
The degree to which minds are illuminated by the Angel varies.
On this view, all humanity shares a single agent intellect - a collective consciousness. The final stage of human life, according to Avicenna, is reunion with the emanation of the Angel.
Poetry
Almost half of Avicenna's works are versified.(E.G. Browne, p60-61):
از قعر گل سیاه تا اوج زحل,
Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate
کردم همه مشکلات گیتی را حل,
I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate,
بیرون جستم زقید هر مکر و حیل,
And many Knots unravel'd by the Road;
هر بند گشاده شد مگر بند اجل.
But not the Master-Knot of Human Fate.
Legacy
George Sarton called Ibn Sina "the most famous scientist of Islam and one of the most famous of all races, places, and times."
He was one of the Islamic world's leading writers in the field of medicine and followed the approach of Hippocrates and Galen. Along with Rhazes, Ibn Nafis, Al-Zahrawi and Al-Ibadi, he is considered an important compiler of Early Muslim medicine. He is remembered in Western history of medicine (under his latinised name Avicenna) as a major historical figure who made fundamental contributions to medicine and the European reawakening.
In Iran, he is considered a national icon, and is often regarded as one of the greatest Persians to have ever lived. An impressive monument to the life and works of the man who is known as the 'doctor of doctors' still stands outside the Bukhara museum and his portrait hangs in the Hall of the Faculty of Medicine in the University of Paris.
User Comments Add a comment…