Avicenna

Hello. My name is John Marin Vaughn,

and I'm a senior research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge.

I'm going to give seven short talks

about

important mediaeval philosophers.

Now,

the very fact that I've decided to

centre each talk around an important philosopher,

uh is itself quite an important decision and not necessarily the right decision,

because you might want to say that the history of philosophy shouldn't be as

people conventionally do it a matter of looking at the very great philosophers.

Um, but looking much more broadly about how people did philosophy at certain times.

However, having brought up that reservation, um,

I'm not only going to continue with my plan, but indeed,

I'm going to start off with someone who

is not just an important mediaeval philosopher.

But I would say in a certain sense, the most important

and those of you who know even a little about mediaeval philosophy

probably have it in mind what name I'm going to say.

You think I'm going to say Thomas a queen? Us?

Uh, but I'm not the subject of this talk is absent or even seen a, uh,

a philosopher who worked in the, uh, late 10th early 11th century, Uh, and far from

being born in Italy as a quietness, wasn't working in Paris,

which we think of as a great centre for medical philosophy.

He was born in present day Uzbekistan

and spent his life in that area, the very east of the lands of Islam. Why do I say that

Abbas Sana is perhaps the most important of all the mediaeval philosophers?

Well, for two reasons.

One is that he completely transformed the tradition of philosophy and, say,

the Arabic tradition of philosophy, uh, in which he worked

to start with what I think is an important point about philosophy in general.

You shouldn't think of philosophy as simply thinking about things in the abstract.

Philosophy is always a matter of developing a tradition

of going back and developing certain ideas which

other philosophers in your tradition have had.

Sometimes this is more explicit, sometimes less explicit.

In

most mediaeval philosophy,

it's more explicit.

That's to say you're dealing with philosophy,

where one is commenting explicitly on the works of earlier thinkers.

Now the Arabic philosophical tradition was of all

the four important traditions of mediaeval Western philosophy,

and I'll come on to say more about this, um,

the one which had the closest contact with the origins of

this type of philosophising in the Greek philosophical schools of late antiquity

and at the beginning of the tradition,

thinkers like the very important 10th century thing who worked in Baghdad.

Al Farabee

were very direct commentators of especially Aristotle.

So you had the Aristotelian texts and they wrote about them.

They often wrote about them in a very interesting and original way.

But still these Aristotelian text were the basis of what they did.

Abbas in a two

was an Aristotelian.

But he thought that because of his own particular genius,

and he wasn't a modest man by any means, uh,

he was able to grasp what Aristotle really should have been saying.

So instead of commenting section by section on the text of Aristotle,

he wove together his own version of Aristotelian ism,

which is really very different from Aristotle

and which he put forward in a series of philosophical encyclopaedias.

So successful was he in doing this

that Arizona replaced Aristotle within the Arabic tradition

with perhaps one important exception which will come to in one of the later talks

In general, people stopped studying Aristotle directly.

Rather, they started Abbas Sana.

Or sometimes they started other later Arabic thinkers.

Um, but Abbas Sania remained throughout the tradition.

Um, the central point of reference.

Abbas Sana are not Aristotle.

Um,

the second reason why I pick a person out is the most important

is

something which in itself is very revealing

about the whole nature of mediaeval philosophy.

Um,

I've already talked about the Arabic tradition as one

of the four important traditions of Western mediaeval philosophy.

Um, the other three traditions are, um, Greek Christian philosophy, uh,

which unfortunately won't be saying much about and does

tend to be the least interesting of the traditions

Jewish philosophy,

which was done both in Arabic and Hebrew

and Latin Philosophy, Latin philosophy.

Suppose what most people think of as mediaeval philosophy. Full stop.

But I think very wrongly, um, But the traditional Latin philosophy,

including people like al Balad who, while discussing the quietness and scooters

and so on

now have a Sana,

was extremely influential not just on the Arabic tradition,

but also on the Jewish tradition

and very much on the Latin tradition from the 13th century onwards,

so that that's why he has such a central position.

No,

I said that Arizona was a Palestinian, but he remoulded our strategy in is, um

how did he do so?

One important way

concerns his treatment of God or the the supreme

being who you have even in Aristotle himself.

For Aristotle, this is what is called noose or intellect.

Um, and certainly in the neo Platonic developments of Aristotle

Arizona Although, of course, he was himself a Muslim, um,

nonetheless sticks quite closely to ancient Greek

ideas about God and the universe.

For example, he insists that the universe is eternal,

not created,

and he's not willing to allow his God, um,

anything but a rather sort of strange

and universal knowledge of particular things.

So you can't really have the type of personal, um, providential God that you do in,

um, classical Islam or indeed in Christianity or Judaism.

Nonetheless,

uh,

after Sanders, God moves closer to the God of the Abrahamic religions of Islam,

Christianity and Judaism.

Um, than he would have found in the Greek background,

because

Amazon insists that

his God

alone in the universe

is

necessarily existent.

Let's say God cannot but exist

everything else which exists exists because of him,

and

it's

necessity of existence derives from its relationship to God himself,

for God itself, which is necessarily existent.

That's one important change.

Another important change comes with regard to his idea of the human soul

and its survival.

Aristotle didn't entirely exclude the idea that some aspect of a human being, uh,

some aspect of the human being's intellect of power

to think about things universally might be immortal,

though

it's certainly not clear that he that he thought that was the case.

Uh, it's very debatable exactly what Aristotle's ideas were on this matter.

The Islamic tradition,

unlike the Christian tradition,

doesn't have the idea of the separate survival of souls.

It's notion of human and mortality is wrapped

up in the idea of a complete resurrection.

Body and soul together

at the centre, however, went against the Islamic tradition

and had a very particular reading of Aristotle

in that he insisted that the human intellect,

um, is immaterial and because it's immaterial, it must be immortal.

There's nothing that can stop it going on existing forever.

Moreover, he introduced

an emphasis on human self consciousness on the self,

which is something really rather new in philosophy you

hardly find in this form in his Greek sources.

And this is brought out very clearly.

Uh, in his famous thought experiment of so called flying Man.

Uh, Vasana envisages somebody who is created with his faculties fully formed,

but he's suspended as it were, um,

and blindfolded so that he he has no sensory awareness

of anything outside himself or of his own limbs.

And Alexander says

this person knows that he that his self, his his his thinking self exists,

but he has absolutely no knowledge that he has hands or arms or heart or whatever.

Um,

and if you were told about these things, he wouldn't think that they were part of him.

He would think there was something quite separate. Um,

and those of you who read a little day cut may be struck by the parallel, um,

which is well worth thinking about