Philosopher/Physician Avicenna

Born near Bukhoro (now in Uzbekistan) as the son of a government official, Avicenna studied medicine and philosophy in his natal town. Because his parentsÆ house was a meeting place for intellectuals, he was able to profit from the teachings of (and conversations with) masters in many different disciplines. He was surrounded from birth with the learning and the questions of his age, and so his later accomplishments should not be entirely surprising.

A precocious child with an exceptional memory (which he would retain all his life), he had memorized the QurÆan and a large body of Arabic poetry by the age of 10 and then switched to the study of logic and metaphysics, first with the aid of teachers and then on his own as he outpaced his instructors. At the age of 16 he began the study and practice of medicine (incorporating ideas both from the Greeks and from the Arabic practices of medicine). At the age of 18 he began to study Islamic law and completed his preliminary medical studies and was quickly rewarded for hi

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ion appeared in 1491, and the Arabic text in 1593, the second text ever printed in Arabic. In its Latin translation it was the standard medical text of the Middle Ages. By the 16th century, it had been copied by hand countless times; it remained popular into the 17th (Afnan, 1958, p. 200). As noted above, Avicenna's philosophical work was not entirely distinct from his work as a physician, and his best-known philosophical work is Kitab ash-Shifa or the Book of Healing and looks at some of the same issues as does the Canon, although from a metaphysical as opposed to more purely physical perspective. The work is a collection of treatises on Aristotelian logic, metaphysics, psychology, the natural sciences, and other subjects. Avicenna's own philosophy was based on a combination of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism. Contrary to orthodox Islamic thought, Avicenna denied personal immortality, God's interest in individuals, and the creation of the world in time, beliefs that were based in part on his study of the natural sciences and his work as a physician. Because of his views, Avicenna became the main target of an attack on such philosophy by the Islamic philosopher al-Ghazali. Nevertheless, Avicenna's philosophy remained influentia
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)