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ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY |
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Select: Avicenna -- Al-Ghazali -- Ibn Tufail -- Avenpace (Ibn Badjdja) Main Ideas:
Important Works:
Avicenna (Ibn Sina) (picture) was a Persian philosopher who spent his life as a physician and scholar-in-residence at many Islamic courts. He died while in service in Isfahan. Nearly a thousand years have passed and the name of Avicenna is still revered in the East. One of the wisest of physicians, he is referred to in the West as the Galen of the Moslem world. The name Avicenna is the Latinized form of the Hebrew, Aven Sina; or the Arabic, Abu Ali al-Husain ibn Abdullah ibn Sina. While still a youth in his teens, Avicenna was called upon to cure the Sultan of Bokhara. The potentate, in gratitude, opened his library to the young man. This good fortune enable Avicenna (who had memorized the Koran by the age of ten) to write the Canon, the basis of his medical fame, before he had attained his legal majority. Many of his writings were translated in the West. Avicenna's works are of a compendious nature, the most notable being a philosophical encyclopedia. As did other Muslim scholars of the Greek school, he attempted to reconcile philosophy and Islam. For Avicenna, philosophy was the true path to understanding. His summaries of Aristotle reveal a neo-platonic outlook, especially in his emphasis on the dualism of mind and matter. He saw matter as passive and creation as the act of instilling existence into this passive substance; only in God are being and existence one. Avicenna also wrote numerous works on medicine. His best known is the Canon of Medicine, based primarily on Greco-Roman medical tracts. An extraordinarily popular work, it was translated into Latin and served as a foundation of medical learning in European universities for centuries. In addition to his medical accomplishments, he studied logic, metaphysics, mathematics, and physics. He studied Aristotelian and the neo-Platonic philosophy of al-Farabi. As a result of this, Avicenna wrote voluminously on Aristotle. He said that cause and effect are simultaneous and therefore God and the world are co-eternal; that God created intelligence or the soul, and these emanate from the heavens and reach the earth in huge chains; that intelligence is sustained by God, and though that is innately eternal, its multiple extensions are not dependent on Him, for He is not concerned with matter. Avicenna was probably a pantheist. His work Philosophia Orientalis, in which his position was apparently clarified, is lost. His mysticism is said to have been derived from Mazdaism. For a time he occupied the office of Vizier at Hamadan. In The Radical Academy
Elsewhere On the Internet
Main Ideas:
Important Works:
Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, born in the northeastern part of the Persian empire, was a philosopher, theologian, mystic, and apologist, and one of the most revered personalities in the Muslim world. The greatest teachers of Islam have bestowed upon him inumerable encomiums, among them, "the guide to the True Faith," "the embodiment of religious thought," "the living reaffirmation of Islam." In his spiritual autobiography The Deliverer from Error, Ghazali describes the great crisis that forced him in 1095 to abandon his brilliant professional career in Baghdad and to search for an inner, direct knowledge of the reality of God. He adopted the life of a wandering ascetic and mystic, visited Damascus, Jerusalem, and Mecca, and lived with some disciples in his birthplace, Tus (in present-day Iran), before he was persuaded to return in 1106 to his teaching career. He retired to Tus in 1110. Of his more than 50 books, the The Incoherence of the Philosophers and The Revival of the Religious Sciences are particularly important. Ghazali, never a bigoted orthodox, both advocated and practiced tolerance. He often advised his co-religionists to take the pious Jew as their model in religious reverence. In fact, Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages soon became aware that Ghazali's principles and teachings were closely akin to those of Judaism, a fact that has often been confirmed by modern Christian scholars. Ghazali was deeply influenced by Sufism despite his faithful study of the Koran. His doctrine of emanation was derived from neo-Platonic writings. He classified those who denied this doctrine as children, for both confuse marionettes or wooden idols with reality. His criticisms of causality pre-dated David Hume's parallel theories by several centuries, and he exerted great influence over William of Ockham and other Christian philosophers. He compared the pursuit of knowledge to the process involved in digging a well: both involved probing; the desired object in both cases was necessary to life. In The Radical Academy
The author of "Robinson Crusoe" certainly must have read the English version of Ibn Tufail's book Hai Ebn Yokdhan (Alive, Son of Awaken), the imaginary and allegorical story of a man who, living alone on an island, without any intercourse with human beings, discovered truth and conquered nature by reasonable thinking. This book became favorite reading in Europe. It was translated into French, Spanish, German and Dutch, and into English in 1674 and 1708. Its English title is The Improvement of Human Reason. The full name of its author is Abu Bekr Mohammed ben Abd'el Malik ben Mohammed ben Mohammed ben Tu-fail el-Quaici. His contemporaries also called him El Andaloci, which, at that time, meant Spaniard, or the man of Cordova, or the man of Seville. He was a physician in Granada who then became secretary to the governor and finally vizier of Sultan Abu Yakub Yusuf, who ruled over Islamic Spain and Morocco. Ibn Tufail distinguished himself in medicine, poetry and astronomy. He criticized the Ptolemaic system as did other Arabic and Jewish thinkers of that period. He was highly respected as a scholar whose wisdom attracted men of all countries. The chronicles of his time also praise him as a Maecenas. Ibn Tufail especially protected Averroes and recommended him to his ruler as his successor when, in 1182, he retired from office. According to contemporary reports, Averroes was inspired to his commentaries on Aristotle by a conversation with Ibn Tufail and the Sultan, who complained that Aristotle was too obscure to him. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Avenpace (Ibn Badjdja) - (c. 11th century - 1138) Avenpace was a high dignitary in Islamic Spain for twenty years when he was poisoned by his enemies who decried him as an atheist and scorner of the Koran. He was a reputed musician and well acquainted with the natural sciences, mathematics and astronomy. Avenpace wrote commentaries on sever works of Aristotle, whom he interpreted in accordance with neo-Platonism, and treatises among which The Hermit's Guide was most famous. It was used by Averroes and the Jewish author Moses of Narbonne, as well as by Albertus Magnus and Aquinas. He distinguished between "animal" and "human" activities, regarded the human intellect as the emanation of the Agent Intellect, the supreme Being, and described their mystical union. In The Radical Academy |
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