Ibn Sina or Avicenna
Abu ‘Ali Ibn Sina (ca. 980-1037 CE), known in Latin as Avicenna, was a physician, natural philosopher, mathematician, poetic mystic, and princely minister. Of Persian descent, he was born in Afshana in the province of Bukhara.
His chief philosophical work, Kitab al-shifa’ (Book of Healing), which was known in Latin as Liber Sufficientia, together with its condensed revision, Kitab al-najat (Book of Deliverance), led many to regard him as being the authoritative Neoplatonist integrator of the Aristotelian corpus. However, his intellectual acumen elevates his station beyond that of a commentator and lets him stand as an insightful thinker in his own right.
His philosophical investigations covered mathematics, music, logic, physical and psychical sciences, as well as metaphysics and theology. In geometry, he critically examined Euclid’s Elements and attempted to prove its fifth postulate. In his Aristotelian intromission conception of vision, he showed that the velocity of light had a finite magnitude.
Partly influenced by Porphyry's Isagoge, Aristotle's Organon, and Galen's logical investigations, he eventually developed intricate forms of propositional logic. Furthermore, he founded a proto-theory of meaning that was partially embodied in his work Kitab al-hudud (Book of Definitions), wherein he arrived at definitions by way of a rigorous distinction among concepts. Unlike most Platonists, he celebrated the merits of the art of persuasion and rhetoric.
Author
Professor Nader El-Bizri
Professor Nader El-Bizri is a philosopher and architect. He is currently affiliated with the University of Cambridge, and he was until recently the Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Sharjah. Prior to that he was a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Durham University and a tenured Professor at the American University of Beirut, where he served as the Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and as the Director of General Education. Before that he taught and conducted research across the academic ranks at the universities of Harvard, Nottingham, Lincoln, and at the CNRS in Paris and the IIS in London. He serves on various academic boards internationally and is the General Editor of the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity series that is published by Oxford University Press in association with the IIS. He has acted as advisor to the Science Museum in London, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Geneva, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in Berlin, UNESCO in Paris, and Expo2020 in Dubai. He has been interviewed by the BBC and France Culture cultural programs, and in recognition of his contributions to the field, he has received awards and honours, including the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences Prize.
