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Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbdallāh Ibn Sīnā, often called ‘Avicenna’ in English because this was his name in medieval Latin, was the most important and influential philosopher of the Islamic world. His impact on Islamic intellectual culture can be compared to that of Plato and Aristotle in classical antiquity, or Kant in modern European philosophy, in that all subsequent thinkers had to respond to him favourably or unfavourably, explicitly or implicitly, directly or indirectly. He supplanted Aristotle as the figure who, more than any other, represented what ‘philosophy’ ( falsafa) was. We can see this from a backhanded compliment paid by his most famous critic: when the theologian al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) wrote a refutation of Ibn Sīnā, he called it simply Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al-falāsifa). To criticize Ibn Sīnā was, it seems, to criticize philosophy itself.
Actually things are a bit more complicated than that, because the word falsafa evoked in al-Ghazālī’s title meant something narrower than our term ‘philosophy’. To be a faylasūf, that is, a practitioner of falsafa, was to uphold certain doctrines associated specifically with Ibn Sīnā, such as the necessity and eternity of the world, an understanding of God as a pure intellect who does not grasp anything but universal truths, and a conception of science as the exploration of essential natures and necessary causal connections. Al-Ghazālī rejected all this. But he was a philosopher in his own way, whose own ideas were shaped by the tradition of rationalist Islamic theology or kalām. I mention this because one theme we’ll be pursuing in this book is the relation between Ibn Sīnā and kalām. We’ll find that later thinkers in the Islamic world often saw philosophy in a more general sense (they called it ḥikma, literally ‘wisdom’) as a kind of contest between Ibn Sīnā’s falsafa and traditional kalām. In some cases they saw Ibn Sīnā as adopting a certain position within pre-existing kalām debates, as on the status of the non-existent or the nature of good and evil.
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