Avicenna (Ibn Sina)

Thank you to Google for highlighting Ibn Sina today 7th of August 2018.

Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina is better known in Europe as “Avicenna.”

Born in Afshana in Central Asia in approx 980, he is best known as a polymath, as a physician whose major work al-Qanun fi’l-Tibb continued to be taught as a medical textbook in Europe and in the Islamic world until the early modern period, and as a philosopher whose major summa the Cure -al-Shifa’had a decisive impact upon European scholasticism and especially upon Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274).

Imam Ghazali led a theological attack on Avicenna, and a generation later when the Shahrastani gave an account of the doctrines of the philosophers of Islam, he relied upon the work of Avicenna, whose metaphysics he later attempted to refute in his Struggling against the Philosophers (Musari‘at al-falasifa). Avicennan metaphysics became the foundation for discussions of Islamic philosophy and philosophical theology. In the early modern period in Iran, his metaphysical positions began to be displayed by a creative modification that they underwent due to the thinkers of the school of Isfahan, in particular Mulla Sadra (d. 1641).