Abū `Alī Al-Husayn ibn `Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā , known as Avicenne ابوعلیالحسينبنعبداللهبنسينا was a Philosophe, Médecin and a scientist Persan, one knows that it was interested in many sciences, in particular astronomy. It was born on August 7th 980 (that is to say the first of the month of Safar of year 370 of the Hégire) with Afshéna, close to Bukhara belonging to the province of Khorasan in Persia, currently in Ouzbékistan, and died in Hamadan, in Iran, in August 1037 (first Friday of the month of Ramadan 428 of the Hégire).

Already of alive sound, its disciples called it Sheik el-Ray, the prince of the scientists, largest of the doctors, the Master by escellence, the third Master (after Aristote and Al-Farabi).

Historical context

The conquest of the Egypt put the Moslems in contact with the school of Alexandria. At the first centuries of the Hégire ({{VIIe}} and 8th century), the East is taken of a thirst to translate, especially learn, compile the writings of old, Greek, to comment on them, to assimilate them. A higher bid with the knowledge begins between the Arab culture and the culture Persian. Of 750 with 850, period of the Abbasid Caliph S , science known as " arabo-musulmane" reached its top. The sovereigns paid, sometimes his gold weight, any book recently translated, and thus, as of the 9th century, a major part of the writings of the Greece was available in Arab language. The philosopher Al-Farabi (death in 950), the second Master (in reference to the first Master, Aristote), holds a dominating place in this dynamics.

The texts and traditions of the Islamic dogmas were fixed at that time:

• the Sunnisme, with Al-Ash `ari (935)
• the Shiism duodécimain, with Shaykh Saduq Ibn Babuyeh (991) and Shaykh Mufid (1022)
• the Ismaélisme, or Shiism ismaélien, connects Chiisme, in Arab language and language Persian.

In Latin Occident, it is the Moyen-âge, between the collapse of the Roman Empire (476, invasion of the Hérules) and the Renaissance (1453, the fall of Constantinople).

Biography

Avicenne, from its complete name Abu 'Ali Al-Husayn Ibn Abd Allah Ibn Sina, was born at August 980 in Khormeytan (or Afshéna, the " country of the soleil"), close to Bukhara, in the east of the Persian (Transoxiane, i.e. into current Ouzbékistan). His/her father was Moslem Shiite ismaélien and his mother probably of Jewish origin - there exists a controversy on this subject. It seems that he was early in his interest for the natural science and medicine, that at 14 years, he only studies. It retains of memory the entirety of the Coran. He studied in Bukhara, embraced all sciences, and devoted himself especially to medicine. He is influenced by an Al-Farabi treaty, which enables him to overcome the difficulties that he meets in the study of the Metaphysics of Aristote. This precocity in the studies doubles of a precocity in the career: at 16 years already, it directed famous doctors.

All then is connected: having cured the prince samanide of Bukhara, Nuh ibn Mansûr, of a serious disease, it is authorized to consult the vast library of the palate. Its helping appetite of knowledge, it would have had at 18 years all known sciences. After the death of the prince and that of his father, who force it to earn his living, his itinerant life starts. He travels initially in the Khârezm, principality which was independent (of 994 with 1231) in the south of the Mer of Aral, on two banks of Djihoun (Amou-daria), between Bukhara and the Caspian Sea. With Djouzdjan, a powerful guard, Abu Muhammed Chirâzi, allows him to give public courses. It starts to compose its major work, the Qanûn (or Canon) of medicine.

It passes then by the Khorassan, the current North-East of the Iran, then Rayy (then Rhagès, near to current Teheran), finally with Hamadan (in the west of modern Iran) where the emir bouyide Shams o-dowleh chooses it as minister (vizier). It is essential a harassing work program then: the day, it is devoted to the public thing, the night with science. In addition to living two careers, he works doubly: he carries out face the composition of medical Shifa and that of Canon; the task is then if crushing that it must be made help: two disciples share the second reading of the layers of the two works, of which faithful the Al-Juzjani, secretary and biographer.

In 1021, the death of the prince Shams o-dowleh, and the beginning of the reign of his/her son Sama o-dowleh, crystallize the ambitions and rancours: victim of political intrigues, Avicenne knows the prison. Disguised as a dervish, it succeeds in escaping, and flees with Ispahan, near the emir kakouyide `Ala o-dowleh. These upheavals do not start its bulimia of work.

He enjoys such a reputation, that several princes of Asia called it at their court: the king of Persia employed it at the same time like Vizier and doctor. He cultivated philosophy also successfully, and was one of the first studied and to make known Aristote. He composed according to this philosopher of the treaties of logic and metaphysics, where he often shows original thinker.

During a forwarding of which it formed part, of the emir `Ala o-dowleh against Hamadan, Avicenne is struck by an intestinal crisis engraves, from which it suffered for a long time, and contracted, says one, following excess of work and pleasure. Avicenne tried to look after itself, but its remedy was fatal for him. He died at the age, always early, of fifty-seven years in August 1037 (428 of the hégire) after having carried out a life extremely agitated and full with vicissitudes, exhausted at the same time by the excess of work and the vice.

Discusses around the confession of the mother of Avicenne

The confession of the mother of Avicenne is known only by secondary sources. If one can suppose in first approach which it is Moslem, certain sources indicate that it was Jewish: it is the case in particular in Avicenne of Gilbert Sinoué. If this question could have little impact on the range of work of the scientist who was Avicenne, it could nevertheless have had an influence on the education which he could have received. The sultan Mahmûd de Ghaznî would have spread this information in order to “ calumniate ” the philosopher. But the question always remains unanswered.

Its work

From a variable width according to the sources (276 titles for G.C. Anawati, 242 for Yahya Mahdavi), the work of Avicenne, at all events, immense, and is varied in all its aspects: Avicenne wrote mainly in the erudite language of its time, the Classical Arabic , but sometimes also in the vernacular language, the Persan.

He is the author of monuments, of more modest works, but also of short texts. Its work covers all the extent of the knowledge of its time:

• Logical, Linguistic, Poetry;
• Physical, Psychology, Medicine, Chemistry;
• Mathematical, Music, Astronomy;
• Moral and economy;
• Metaphysical;
• Mystical and comments of sourates of the Coran.

The personal intention of the philosopher finds his completion in the Eastern philosophy ( hikmat mashriqiya ), which took the form of the compilation of twenty-eight thousand questions. This work disappeared at the time of the bag of Ispahan (1034), and there remains about it only some fragments.

During several centuries, until the 17th century, its Qanûn is at the base of teaching in Europe where it détrône Galien, as well as in Asia.

One owes him the use of the breakage, the Rhubarbe, the tamarin, the Myrobatan, etc

Old publications

Works of Avicenne were published in Arab, with Rome, in 1593, folio.

One translated into Latin and published his Canons or Precepts of medicine , Venice, 1483, 1564 and 1683 his philosophical Œuvres , Venice, 1495; its Metaphysical or philosophy first , Venice, 1495.

Pierre Vattier had translated all its works into French; he appeared of it only Logic , Paris, 1658, in-8.

Influences

Avicenne, fine well-read man, was the translator of works of Hippocrates and Galien, and carried a care particular to the study of Aristote. It falls under a general movement which saw the philosophers of Islamic culture discovering the culture Greek that and making it redécouvrir later on in the occident.

As regards, on the other hand, contemporary influences, the business is heard. Avicenne was close to the Shiism Ismaélien, the current to which belonged his/her father and his brother; moreover its autobiography brings back their efforts to involve his adhesion with the dawat ismaélienne. However, the cover which brings to him the princes of Hamadan and Ispahan, Shiites duodécimains, leaves think that it would have joined with this obedience. Today, he would be strongly denounced by the wahabbites and the salafists, many among the Moslems sunnites.

This controversy is less futile than it appears to with it. The ismaelism includes/understands important personalities, such as Abu Yaqoub Sejestani (10th century), Abu Hatim Al Razi (death in 933), Hamid Kermani (towards 1017), or Nasir E Khosraw (between 1072 and 1077) of which work with strongly influenced the thought in the Islam. Thus, the theory of the Ten Intelligences (see low), started at Al-Farabi appears at Hamid Kermani before Avicenne adapts it.

The Medicine of Avicenne

The Canon of medicine

See also: Qanûn (Avicenne)

The Kitab Al Qanûn fi Al-Tibb (“book of the medical laws”), composed of 5 books, is the major medical work of Avicenne.

Influence of Avicenne

The success which its Canon met was such as the work made before him by Rhazès (850 - 926), Haly-Abbas (930 - 994) and Abu Al-Qasim (936 - 1013) or even after, by Ibn-Al-Nafis (1210 - 1288), were eclipsed. The cross , moreover, were not mistaken there: XII {{E}} at the 17th century, the Canon of Medicine, which it brought back of the the Middle East, was used as base with medicine for the experts and teaching of this one.

In turn translated, into Latin by Gerard de Crémone between 1150 and 1187, printed, in Hebrew with Milan in 1473, then with Venice in 1527 and with Rome in 1593, Canon is disputed only late, with the Renaissance: Léonard de Vinci rejects of it the anatomy and Paracelse burns it. But beyond that, it is the alarm clock of the European science which sounds its obsolescence (for example the description of blood circulation by William Harvey in 1628).

Until 1909 a course of the medicine of Avicenne was given to Brussels.

Avicenne shines in the fields of ophthalmology, gynéco-obstetrics and psychology. He excels in the description of the symptoms, describing all the diseases indexed at the time, including those concerning psychiatry.

• It is the first to distinguish the Pleurésie, the Médiastinite and the under-phrenic abscess.

• It describes the two forms of facial paralyzes (power station and peripheral)
• It gives the symptomatology of the diabetes.
• It can make the differential diagnosis between the Sténose of the pylore and the Ulcère of the stomach.
• It describes various varieties of Ictère S.
• It gives a description of the cataract, Méningite, etc
• It has a presentiment of the role of the rats in the propagation of the Peste.
• It indicates that certain infections are transmitted by way Placenta anger.
• It is the first to recommend treatments by bladders of ices and rectal injections rectal.
• It discovers that blood leaves the heart to go to the lungs then to return from there, and exposes with precision the system of ventricles and valves of the heart.
• It is the first to correctly describe the Anatomie of the human eye.
• It put forth also the assumption according to which water and the atmosphere would contain tiny organizations vectors some infectious illness.

But above all, Avicenne is interested in the means of preserving health. It recommends the regular practice of the sport or the Hydrothérapie in Preventive medicine and curative. He insists on the importance of the human relations in the conservation of a mental and somatic good health.

The medicine of Avicenne, if it is possible to summarize it, can the being by the sentence of introduction of Urdjuza Fi-Tib' ( Poème of Medicine ): “ medicine is art to preserve health and possibly, to cure the disease which has occurred in the body ”.

Philosophical doctrines

Its philosophical doctrines, in particular its metaphysics, are based on that of Aristote and on work of Al-Farabi. One raises in what remains of its works the search of an Eastern philosophy and a personal mystic.

Metaphysics

Islamic philosophy, impregnated of theology, conceived more clearly than Aristote the distinction between gasoline and Existence: whereas the existence is the field of the quota, accidental, the gasoline is, by definition, which perdure in the being through its accidents.

First Intelligence

The gasoline, for Avicenne, is not-contingent. So that a gasoline is brought up to date in an authority (an existence), it is necessary that this existence is made necessary by the gasoline itself. This relation of cause and effect, always because the gasoline is not contingent, is inherent in the gasoline itself. Thus it must exist a necessary gasoline in itself so that the existence can be possible: the Being necessary, or God; This Being creates the First Intelligence by emanation.

This definition deteriorates the design of creation deeply: we are not any more in the presence of one divinity creating by whim, but vis-a-vis a divine thought which thinks itself; the passage of this first being to existing is a required and either a will. The world emanates then from God by superabundance of His Intelligence, following what the neoplatonicians named emanation: an immaterial causality.

Avicenne takes as a starting point the work of Al-Farabi, but with this difference that it is the necessary Being which is at the origin of all (see low the Ten intelligences). This prospect would be thus more compatible with Coran.

Creation

It is of this First Intelligence that the creation of plurality will proceed. Indeed,

• the First Intelligence, by contemplating the principle which realizes it necessarily (i.e. God), gives place to the Second Intelligence.

• the First Intelligence, while being contemplated like emanation of this principle, gives place to the First Heart, which animates the sphere of the spheres (that which contains all the others).
• First Intelligence, by contemplating its gasoline nature made possible by itself, i.e. the possibility of its existence, creates the matter which fills up the sphere of the spheres, it is the sphere of the fixed ones.

This triple contemplation founds the first degrees to be it. She repeats herself, giving rise to the double hierarchy:

• higher hierarchy, Avicenne designates them as Chérubins (Kerubim);
• lower hierarchy, Avicenne indicates them like the Angels of the magnificence: these hearts animate the skies, but are deprived of direction (direction of perception of sensitive); they are located between pure understandable and sensitive, and are characterized by their imagination, which enables them to wish the intelligence of which they proceed. The movement eternal whom it print with the skies results from their always unsatiated search for this intelligence which they wish to reach. They are at the origin of the visions of the prophets for example.

This hierarchy corresponds to the Ten including Spheres (Sphere of the Spheres, Sphère of Fixed, seven planetary Spheres, sublunary Sphère).

The Angel

The tenth intelligence revêt a singular importance: also called intellect agent or the Angel , and associated with Gabriel in Coran, it is located so far from the Principle which its emanation bursts in a multitude of fragments. Indeed, from the contemplation of the Angel by itself, as an emanation of the ninth intelligence, does not emanate a celestial heart, but the human hearts. Whereas the Angels of the Magnificence are deprived of direction, the human hearts have an imagination sensual, significant, which confers the capacity to them to drive the material bodies.

For Avicenne, human intellect is not forged for the abstraction of the forms and the ideas. The man is however intelligent in power, but only the illumination by the Angel confers the capacity to them to pass from knowledge in power to knowledge in act. However, the force with which the Angel illuminates human intellect varies:

• the prophets, flooded of the impulse so much so that it irradiates either only rational intellect but also imagination, re-emit bound for the other men this superabundance;
• Of others receives as well impulse, though less as the prophets, as he write, teach, legislate, also taking part in the redistribution towards the others;
• Of others still receives some enough for their personal perfection;
• And others, finally, if little that they never pass to the act.

According to this design, humanity divides one and only one intellect agent, i.e. a collective conscience. The ultimate stage of the human life, therefore, is the union with the emanation angelica. Thus, this immortal heart confers, with all those which made perception of the impulse angelica a practice, the capacity of surexistence, i.e. immortality.

For the Neo-Platonists, of which Avicenne forms part, the immortality of the heart is a consequence of its nature, and not a finality.

Eastern philosophy

This second part of philosophy avicennienne is badly known for us; the work éponyme disappeared during the bag from Ispahan, in 1034, at the same time as the “Book of the equitable arbitration” ( Kitab Al-Insaf ), and Avicenne did not have time or the force to rewrite it. Of this monumental work (twenty-eight thousand questions) remain only some fragments. Henry Corbin thinks that its works are the starting point of the project of Eastern philosophy that Sohrawardi will carry out in the long term.

Occident and the East

The Western orientalists discussed a long time significance even of the term mashriqiya :

• a disagreement on vocalization ( mushriqiya instead of mashriqiya ) leads certain orientalists to speak about a illuminative philosophy .

• the localization of “Eastern” gave place to intense speculations, but any assumption forever really convinced.

The tradition, in Islamic theosophy and mystic, regards mashriq (the East) as world of the light, that of the Intelligences and thus of the Angels, in opposition to maghrib (Occident) which represents the sublunary world, world of darkness where the hearts decline. This design is already explicit at Avicenne (see the account symbolic system Hayy ibn Yaqzan ), and will all the more be it in its commentators and critics, like Sohrawardi.

The mystical East

Avicenne is author of three texts (the “Account of Hayy ibn Yaqzan”, the “Account of the bird”, the “Account of Salâmân” and “Absâl”) which informs us on the significance of this Eastern philosophy, and answer the questions: where is the East? How to go there? How to reach it?

• Account of Hayy ibn Yaqzan: We discover Hayy ibn Yaqzan child, isolated on an island. He discovers itself the universe which surrounds it. This account forms an initiation with the East, with the archangelic forms of light, in opposition to the occident and in the extreme-occident (place of the pure Matter). Hayy ibn Yaqzan personalizes Avicenne in its relationship to the Angel.

• Account of the bird: This account answers the account of Hayy ibn Yaqzan. He undertakes this voyage to the Far East, this search of the absolute to arrive at the “City of the King”. The heart woke up with itself. In the extase of a mental rise, it crosses the valleys and the cosmic assembly lines in company of the Angel.

• Account of Salâmân and Absâl: This account describes the drama of the two heroes of the final part of the Kitab Al-Isharat wa-l-tanbihat (Book of the directives and the remarks). These two characters typify two intellects - contemplative (or speculative) and practical - duality which one finds in the couples Phôs Lumière and Adam terrestrial, Prométhée and Épiméthée, in a word the man célestiel and the man of flesh. Thus, the structure of the heart divides according to the same structure which orders the couples of Archangels-Kerubim and Angel-Hearts (cf supra).

Influence of Avicenne

The influence of Avicenne is double:

1°) the current of the Latin Avicennisme which is opposed to other currents of the medieval Scolastique (see Averroïsme);

2°) the current of Iranian Avicennisme, represented in particular by Nasir Tusi.

Avicenne and Averroès

As we saw higher, for Avicenne “human intellect has neither the role nor the capacity to abstract the understandable one from the sensitive one. Any knowledge and any reminiscence are an emanation and an illumination coming from the Angel” (Henry Corbin). The human one is intelligent in power , but without the intervention angelica, this nature remains unexploited.

For its part, Averroès will release the aristotelism of the Platonic additions which had been grafted on him: not emanatism at his place.

Avicenne in Occident -->

Partial source

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