It has been over a year since I finished with the course on Middle Eastern philosophy, for which this very blog was created. But now, as we are collectively approaching the end of September 2021, I find myself logging in to this humble blog once again. Frankly, I would not be doing this if it was not mandatory to upload a blog post every week in order to be able to write the exams for this course I’m following called Reading Avicenna in Medieval Times. It’s not that I don’t enjoy writing, or that I’m not interested in the course curriculum, not at all! The reason for my hesitance is that the subject of Avicennan metaphysics is so absolutely horrifying in its seeming complexity that I feel like it could swallow me whole. However, the exact reason why I enrolled in this course is the challenge I knew it would offer me. In this introductory post I will try to refresh my memory on who Avicenna was, on what metaphysics means and figure out what I’m doing here. I will be happy with having any sort of answer for the first two. Bear with me, we are on a learning journey together! Yay!

Avicenna (ca. 970–1037) was a philosopher and physician of paramount importance in the Middle Eastern realm of traditions. It was the time to be alive for a philosopher and scientist as him, as ”[s]cience was much more integrally related to the social and political life and discourse during this period, which is also a significant factor in its rapid spread and development in the Islamic world” (Gutas 2016). He was a philosophical mastermind, and produced immense amounts of scientific and philosophical works, including an extensive commentary on the works of Aristotle, and a comprehensive work of all parts of philosophy, a summa philosophiae, if you will. He aimed at bringing philosophy, in its whole glory as it had presented itself so far, up to date. Furthermore, one of Avicenna’s main aims in his works was to explain and study the relation between the human and the divine.

The human as a rational being was an object of interest for Avicenna. How does the rational soul acquire knowledge? What are the operations of the soul that bring it about? The field of metaphysics, at the time, encompassed every problem that did not fit neatly with logic or physics. Put most simply, metaphysics is the study of being as such without additional tools; being qua being. The tools that I’m referring to are frameworks such as biology, psychology and physics, all of which are great disciplines that offer us understanding of the world around us. What metaphysics wants to do, however, is to characterize and explain the very nature of being only through the lens of language. Do you understand why I’m so nervous about this?

During the first part of the course, my fellow students and I will be reading Avicenna’s writings on metaphysics in his book Al-Isharat wa’l-tanbihat (Remarks and Admonitions: Physics and Metaphysics as translated by Shams Inati). The idea of the texts it contains is to hint at and signify possible solutions to problems, without necessarily offering the easy way out for the reader. What is accessible through acquainting oneself with the work is merely what the author indicated. It is an understatement to say that this will be a challenge. However, I am excited to jump into the figurative abyss with this one.

Source:

Gutas, Dimitri, ”Ibn Sina [Avicenna]”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/ibn-sina/