We will return to his epistemology later but first what can we say about his life? Avicenna was born in around in Afshana, a village near Bukhara in Transoxiana. His father, who may have been Ismaili, was a local Samanid governor. This training and the excellent library of the physicians at the Samanid court assisted Avicenna in his philosophical self-education.
Thus, he claimed to have mastered all the sciences by the age of 18 and entered into the service of the Samanid court of Nuh ibn Mansur r. After the death of his father, it seems that he was also given an administrative post. Around the turn of the millennium, he moved to Gurganj in Khwarazm, partly no doubt to the eclipse of Samanid rule after the Qarakhanids took Bukhara in There he first met his disciple and scribe Juzjani.
After a year, he entered Buyid service as a physician, first with Majd al-Dawla in Rayy and then in in Hamadan where he became vizier of Shams al-Dawla. Based in Isfahan, he was widely recognized as a philosopher and physician and often accompanied his patron on campaign. It was during one of these to Hamadan in that he died of colic. An arrogant thinker who did not suffer fools, he was fond of his slave-girls and wine, facts which were ammunition for his later detractors. Avicenna wrote his two earliest works in Bukhara under the influence of al-Farabi.
Aristotle, that covers the natural sciences, logic, mathematics, metaphysics and theology. It was this work that through its Latin translation had a considerable impact on scholasticism. It was solicited by Juzjani and his other students in Hamadan in and although he lost parts of it on a military campaign, he completed it in Isfahan by According to Gutas it was written in Isfahan in the early s; according to Michot, it dates from an earlier period in Hamadan and possibly Rayy.
One further work that has inspired much debate is The Easterners al-Mashriqiyun or The Eastern Philosophy al-Hikma al-Mashriqiya which he wrote at the end of the s and is mostly lost.
In certain cases the Latin manuscripts of the text predate the extant Arabic ones and ought to be considered more authoritative. The main significance of the Latin corpus lies in the interpretation for Avicennism andAvicennism, in particular forregarding his doctrines on the nature of the soul and his famous existence-essence distinction more about that below andbelow , along with the debates and censure that they raised in scholastic Europe, in particular in ParisEurope.
This was particularly the case in Paris, where Avicennism waslater proscribed in However, the influence of his psychology and theory of knowledge upon William of Auvergne and Albertus Magnus have been noted.
More significant is the impact of his metaphysics upon the work and thought of Thomas Aquinas. His other major work to be translated into Latin was his medical treatise the Canon , which remained a text-book into the early modern period and was studied in centrescenters of medical learning such as Padua. Logic is a critical aspect of, and propaedeutic to, Avicennan philosophy. On the age-old debate whether logic is an instrument of philosophy Peripatetic view or a part of philosophy Stoic view , he argues that such a debate is futile and meaningless.
More importantly, logic is a key instrument and standard for judging the validity of arguments and hence acquiring knowledge. Salvation depends on the purity of the soul and in particular the intellect that is trained and perfected through knowledge. Of particular significance for later debates and refutations is his notion that knowledge depends on the inquiry of essential definitions hadd through syllogistic reasoning.
From al-Farabi, Avicenna inherited the Neoplatonic emanationist scheme of existence. Contrary to the classical Muslim theologians, he rejected creation ex nihilo and argued that cosmos has no beginning but is a natural logical product of the divine One. The super-abundant, pure Good that is the One cannot fail to produce an ordered and good cosmos that does not succeed him in time.
The cosmos succeeds God merely in logical order and in existence. Consequently, Avicenna is well known as the author of one an important and influential proof for the existence of God. The argument runs as follows: There is existence, or rather our phenomenal experience of the world confirms that things exist, and that their existence is non-necessary because we notice that things come into existence and pass out of it.
Contingent existence cannot arise unless it is made necessary by a cause. A causal chain in reality must culminate in one un-caused cause because one cannot posit an actual infinite regress of causes a basic axiom of Aristotelian science.
Therefore, the chain of contingent existents must culminate in and find its causal principle in a sole, self-subsistent existent that is Necessary.
This, of course, is the same as the God of religion. This final mode of essence is quite distinct from existence. Essences are thus existentially neutral in themselves. God on the other hand is absolutely simple, and cannot be divided into a bundle of distinct ontological properties that would violate his unity.
Contingents, as a mark of their contingency, are conceptual and ontological composites both at the first level of existence and essence and at the second level of properties. Contingent things in this world come to be as mentally distinct composites of existence and essence bestowed by the Necessary. The quest to understand being qua being subsumes the philosophical notion of God. Indeed, as we have seen divine existence is a cornerstone of his metaphysics.
Divine existence bestows existence and hence meaning and value upon all that exists. Two questions that were current were resolved through his theory of existence. Second, the age-old problem was discussed: if God is good, how can evil exist? Divine providence ensures that the world is the best of all possible worlds, arranged in the rational order that one would expect of a creator akin to the demiurge of the Timaeus.
But while this does not deny the existence of evil in this world of generation and corruption, some universal evil does not exist because of the famous Neoplatonic definition of evil as the absence of good. Particular evils in this world are accidental consequences of good. The second most influential idea of Avicenna is his theory of the knowledge.
The human intellect at birth is rather like a tabula rasa , a pure potentiality that is actualized through education and comes to know. Knowledge is attained through empirical familiarity with objects in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts. It is developed through a syllogistic method of reasoning; observations lead to prepositional statements, which when compounded lead to further abstract concepts. But the question arises: how can we verify if a proposition is true?
How do we know that an experience of ours is veridical? There are two methods to achieve this. First, there are the standards of formal inference of arguments —Is the argument logically sound? Second, and most importantly, there is a transcendent intellect in which all the essences of things and all knowledge resides. This intellect, known as the Active Intellect, illuminates the human intellect through conjunction and bestows upon the human intellect true knowledge of things.
Conjunction, however, is episodic and only occurs to human intellects that have become adequately trained and thereby actualized. A syllogistic inference draws a conclusion from two prepositional premises through their connection or their middle term. It is sometimes rather difficult to see what the middle term is; thus when someone reflecting upon an inferential problem suddenly hits upon the middle term, and thus understands the correct result, she has been helped through intuition hads inspired by the active intellect.
There are various objections that can be raised against this theory, especially because it is predicated upon a cosmology widely refuted in the post-Copernican world. Ibn Sina argued that the man would still affirm that he existed, even without any sensory input from his environment or means of confirming the existence of his body. Thus Ibn Sina set out to demonstrate that the soul self is not dependent on the body for its being, and that the soul in addition is immaterial, unlike the body.
Although ethnically Turkie or Persian, Ibn Sina wrote primarily in Arabic, which was the common language of science and politics in large areas of the Middle East.
Al-Razi was the first physician to differentiate measles from smallpox and he put great emphasis on close clinical observation, an idea that may have influenced Ibn Sina.
Ibn Sina turned to the study of medicine at age Prominent physicians began to study under him, and the reason that he was later sought after by so many royal patrons was his ability to successfully cure illness and his reputation as a physician. Later he would systematise his medical knowledge in the encyclopaedia Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb or the Canon of Medicine.
Translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona, the book became a standard textbook in European medical schools well into the 17th century. Unani Tibb is recognised as a legitimate medical system along with Ayurveda by the Indian government, and about 40 Unani Tibb colleges in India still teach the humoral model of physiology as developed by Ibn Sina.
The Canon is divided into five sections: a general introduction, properties of therapeutic substances, localised diseases, systemic diseases and pharmacology. In this sense, he can truly be credited along with al-Razi with developing the idea of modern evidence-based medicine, since cures for Ibn Sina required some basis in the practical application of medicine, not just an explanatory and theoretical framework.
There Ibn Sina found rare books that he had never heard of before and books that he was never to see again in his lifetime. He seems to have devoured so many of the books available in his day that in his later years he was able to extract knowledge rapidly from new books that came into his possession.
His pupil and biographer, al-Juzjani, observed that in the 25 years that he knew Ibn Sina, he never saw him read a new book from beginning to end but rather he would open the book and go directly to the difficult passages and problems to see what the author had to say about them. And so in philology the Master reached a stage the like of which seldom occurs.
He ordered them to be bound and their leather made to look worn. Abu Mansur had been prattling in the philology he had put forward, without authority to back it up; so then he realised that these letters were written by the Master, and that his insulting him that day was what brought it upon him.
So he cleared himself by apologising to him. The Master then wrote a book on philology which he called The Arabic Language, which has not been equalled in philology. His constant movement was partially related to the political turmoil of the time. The Samanid empire in which he was born declined and fell during his lifetime.
Ibn Sina eventually entered the service of the Amir Shams al-Dawla, member of the shia Buyid Dynasty which in the 10th century controlled an area which corresponds to the eastern part of modern Iraq and the western part of modern Iran. Ibn Sina became embroiled in the dynastic disputes of the two brothers Majd al-Dalwa and Shams al-Dawla and their mother the regent Sayyida. He treated the Amir Shams al-Dawla for colic and became his close friend.
It is therefore not surprising to find that Ibn Sina's descriptions of the pulse have been described by the Greeks before, most notably by Galen who controlled medical thinking for centuries. Galen's teaching on the pulse dominated clinical practice for about sixteen centuries. Some of his books on the pulse have been lost but eighteen books are known to be extant and are regarded as authentic.
I find the similarity in the doctrines and descriptions of the pulse by Galen and Ibn Sina quite striking and startling. Clearly, Ibn Sina subscribed to Galen's pulse doctrines.
What is felt by the fingers must be described to give shades of meaning to a purely subjective perception. Ancient scholars often resorted to comparing pulse rhythms to the motion of animals and Ibn Sina was no exception. Reading such pulse metaphors is rather charming but no longer helpful in our technical-oriented world. Nevertheless, against a background of modern knowledge, I still find Ibn Sina's pulse descriptions extraordinary. Avicenna was a product of the rich intellectual, cultural, and scientific ferment that swept the Islamic world.
He created a complete philosophical system in the Arabic language. Among the great sages of Islamic medicine, Ibn Sina is the best known in the West. Considered as the successor to Galen, his great medical treatise, the Canon was the standard textbook on medicine in the Arab world and Europe in the 17 th century.
He was a philosopher, physician, psychiatrist and poet. Like Galen, he devoted a large portion of his work to the study of the pulse and his contributions to the field of sphygmology were significant. Avicenna comprehensively covers the subject of the pulse, describes the technique of pulse-taking and records the effects of a variety of conditions on the pulse such as environment, physical condition of patient and emotional states such as anger, pleasure, joy, greaf and fear.
Like Galen, he describes ten features in the pulse and more than fifty identifiable pulses. He described different pulses similar to the pulses being observed in arterial and ventricular arrhythmias.
According to Avicenna, vital power, resistance, and elasticity, were important in the quality, size, and volume of the pulse. He defined concepts such as resistance and elasticity in a physiological manner.
Feeling the pulse is simple, fast, and inexpensive and is still a very useful diagnostic technique. Ibn Sina's descriptions and concepts on the pulse are the foundation for our current state-of-the-art knowledge on the pulse, arrhythmia, and electrophysiology. It is of course impossible for physicians to note all the characteristics of the pulse on palpation as described by Ibn Sina one thousand years ago, but still, many of his observations on the pulse in health and disease are valid today.
Although many Western historians choose to believe that the Arabs were merely transmitters of Greek achievements, it cannot be denied that Islamic philosophers, scientists, and physicians added their own observations and wisdom to the knowledge that they acquired from more ancient civilizations.
They made many original contributions to mathematics, astronomy, physics, alchemy, optics, pharmacology, and medicine. Ibn Sina may have been a follower of Galen but he made many pioneering contributions. Historians agree that he is one of the greatest thinkers and medical scholars in history.
National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Journal List Heart Views v. Heart Views. Rachel Hajar, M. Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Address for correspondence: Rachel Hajar, M. Box , Doha, Qatar; E-mail: moc. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC.
Open in a separate window. The Canon Ibn Sina is known to the wet as Avicenna. Avicenna as psychiatrist Avicenna often used psychological methods to treat his patients. The Pulse Every beat of the pulse comprises two movements and two pauses.
Avicenna, The Canon. Pulses out of the Canon Pulse-taking has evolved in our time to a highly sophisticated digital beat-to-beat display with blood oxygen monitoring to aid us in making a diagnosis. Ibn Sina and Galen It is well-known that the Arabs preserved most of the wisdom and knowledge of antiquity in their writings when Europe was plunged into the Dark Ages.
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