Ibn Sina

Ibn Sina the Persian physician and philosopher known in the Latin West as Avicenna (980-1037), whose Canon of Medicine remained a standard textbook in European and Islamic universities for centuries and whose philosophical synthesis of Aristotle and Neoplatonism shaped Islamic thought. He was among the most influential thinkers of the medieval world.

Youth and Education

Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina was born in 980 near Bukhara, in the region of Transoxiana, into a Persian family of modest means. His father, a local official, arranged for him to be educated in the sciences and letters of the day, and the precocious boy soon outstripped his teachers in logic, geometry and medicine.

By the age of eighteen he had mastered the medical art so thoroughly that, in his own account, he could treat patients confidently and had read every available text on the subject. He also studied philosophy, mathematics and the natural sciences, absorbing the works of Aristotle, Ptolemy and the Greek commentators.

His medical skill brought him to the court of the Samanid emirs, where he gained the favour of the ruler and won permission to use the royal library. He read and copied its manuscripts, deepening his already formidable learning. By the time the Samanid state collapsed, the young scholar was already an accomplished philosopher and physician.

Wanderings and Court Service

After the fall of Bukhara, Ibn Sina spent much of his life moving between the courts of Central Asia and Persia, seeking a ruler to whom he could offer service and from whom he could gain protection and support. He served as a physician and adviser to several local princes, sometimes holding the office of vizier.

His career was unsettled and often dangerous. He was imprisoned at one point when a patron suspected him of intrigue, and he fled from turbulence to turbulence, yet he continued to write wherever he settled. His fame drew students, and his medical practice among the great of the land gave him the leisure and income to pursue his studies.

He found a stable patron late in life at Isfahan, under the Buyid prince Ala al-Dawla, where he completed many of his mature works. He died in 1037 at Hamadan and was buried there, and his tomb has remained a site of commemoration for generations of Persian scholars.

The Canon of Medicine

The Canon of Medicine, completed around 1025, is the work by which Ibn Sina was longest known in Europe. It systematically sets out the whole of medical knowledge of its age, drawing on Greek, Roman, Indian and Arabic sources and arranging them in a clear and orderly fashion suitable for teaching.

The Canon treats the theory of medicine, the parts of the body and their diseases, the diagnosis and treatment of illness, and an extensive pharmacopoeia of drugs and their properties. Ibn Sina added his own clinical observations and reasoned arguments, distinguishing the work from a mere compilation.

Translated into Latin in the twelfth century, the Canon became a standard textbook in the medical schools of Europe, where it was studied alongside the works of Hippocrates and Galen for centuries, and it remained in use into the early modern period. Its authority was so great that some historians call its author the greatest physician of the medieval world.

Philosophy and the Reconciliation of Reason

Ibn Sina's philosophical system, set out in works such as the Book of Healing and the Book of Deliverance, undertook to reconcile the doctrine of Aristotle with the emanations of Neoplatonism and with Islamic belief. Moving beyond the simpler classification of al-Farabi, he developed a comprehensive account of being, causality and the soul.

He drew a fundamental distinction between the essence of a thing and its existence. In all created things existence is something added to essence, so that they are contingent, while God alone is the necessary being whose essence is to exist. This reasoning supplied an influential proof of the existence of God and a theory of creation as a necessary emanation from the One.

He wrote extensively on the human soul, holding that the rational soul is immaterial and immortal and survives the death of the body. He also expounded a theory of knowledge according to which abstract concepts are illuminated by a cosmic active intellect, a doctrine that deeply influenced later Latin scholastics.

Influence and Legacy

Transmitted to Europe through translations made in Toledo and elsewhere, Ibn Sina became known as the Prince of Physicians and the most authoritative philosopher after Aristotle. Thomas Aquinas engaged critically with his teaching, and medieval debates about the eternity of the world, the nature of the soul and the being of God were conducted in his terms.

In the Islamic East he was equally central, though he was attacked by theologians such as al-Ghazali, whose Refutation of Philosophy provoked the defence of Averroes. This long controversy over the relation of philosophy to revelation is one of the great intellectual disputes of medieval civilisation, and Ibn Sina stands at its centre.

His writings spread from medicine into metaphysics, cosmology, logic and psychology, and his influence was felt in Persia no less than in Paris and Oxford. He is remembered as one of the founders of a philosophical tradition that brought Arabic learning into the mainstream of European thought, and as the greatest medical teacher of the Middle Ages.

See also

• Canon of Medicine
• Avicennism
• Al-Farabi
• Al-Ghazali