 | Avicenna, ›The Healing, Logic: Isagoge‹ This book offers a new edition, with English translation and commentary, of the Kitāb al-Madḫal, which opens Avicenna's (d. 1037) most comprehensive summa of Peripatetic philosophy, namely the Kitāb al-Sifāʾ. For the first time, the text is established together with a stemma codicum showing the genealogical relations among 34 manuscripts, the twelfth-century Latin translation, and the literal quotations by Avicenna's first and second-generation students. In this book, Avicenna's reappraisal of Porphyry's Isagoge is examined from both a historical and a philosophical point of view. The key-features of Avicenna's theory of predicables are analyzed in the General Introduction and in the Commentary both in their own right and against the background of the Greek and Arabic exegetical tradition. Readers shall find in this book the first systematic study of the Madḫal which, in addition to being the only logical work of the Sifāʾ ever transmitted in its entirety both in Arabic and in Latin, is crucial for understanding Avicenna's conception of universal predicables at the crossroads between logic and metaphysics. The most famous of the philosopher-scientists of Islam, Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn-Abd Allah ibn-Sina, known in the West as Avicenna, was born in Bukhara, Persia, and died in Hamadan. After a long period of wandering through Persia, he became the court physician of Shams al-Dawlah in Hamadan and composed the Kitab ash-shifa (The Book of Healing), a vast philosophical and scientific encyclopedia, and the Canon of Medicine, among the most famous books in the history of medicine. Avicenna was a Neoplatonic thinker whose influence was felt throughout the Christian West during the Middle Ages. Medieval thought reacted powerfully to the rediscovery, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, of the work of Aristotle, which had already been exercising the intellects of Islamic thinkers for some time. Hence, many of the doctrinal disputes that arose in Europe in the course of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries reflect the opposing views of Arab thinkers, notably those of Averroes and Avicenna. Avicenna's thought had developed out of a variety of sources. In addition to Plato there were influences of Stoic logic and earlier Islamic theological philosophers. One of Avicenna's more important beliefs was that God is the Necessary Existent, the necessary ground from which all existent things proceed. In themselves, he argued, nothing that exists does so necessarily; that is, it may or may not be. Everything that exists must therefore have a cause, and the chain of such causality would be an infinite regression without God, the one necessary being. God is thus the cause of all existence and of all things being as they are. This necessitarian limitation provoked a severe reaction among western thinkers, who saw it as a limitation placed on God's freedom. (Bowker Author Biography) |
