The Wisdom of Avicenna (Ibn Sina): Mind, Being, and the Medicine of the Soul

A thousand years ago, one man mapped the whole of reality — from the structure of God's existence to the pulse of a sick body. His name was Ibn Sina, and his vision has never been surpassed.In the Islamic world he was known as the Prince of Physicians. In medieval Europe he was Avicenna, the philosopher whose arguments shaped Thomas Aquinas, whose medical encyclopedia filled university lecture halls for five centuries, and whose proof for the existence of God remains one of the most rigorous in the history of philosophy. Yet despite his towering influence, the full depth of his thought remains largely unknown to general readers. This book restores that depth.Avicenna (Ibn Sina) was born in 980 CE near Bukhara, in the heart of a civilization at its most intellectually ambitious. By eighteen he had mastered medicine, logic, and the whole of Aristotle's philosophy. By middle age he had produced the Canon of Medicine — a systematic account of the human body, its temperaments, and its diseases that would not be displaced from European curricula until the seventeenth century — and the Book of Healing, one of the most comprehensive philosophical encyclopedias ever written.But his achievement was not merely encyclopedic. He invented a thought experiment — the Floating Man — that anticipated Descartes by six centuries and remains a touchstone in contemporary philosophy of mind. He drew a distinction between necessary and contingent being that became the framework within which Maimonides, Aquinas, and Duns Scotus would think about God. He offered a philosophical account of prophecy so precise and so unsettling that al-Ghazali devoted a landmark work to refuting it. And in the last years of his life, he composed a series of visionary allegories — philosophical narratives in which the soul journeys through the structure of the cosmos — that inaugurated a literary and mystical tradition still alive in Iran today.The Wisdom of Avicenna (Ibn Sina): Mind, Being, and the Medicine of the Soul follows the whole arc of his thought: the metaphysics of being and necessity, the psychology of the soul and its faculties, the cosmology of emanation, the medicine of the body's temperaments, the theory of prophetic knowledge, the philosophy of love, and the unfinished Eastern Philosophy he was reaching toward at his death. It is a book for readers who believe that ideas matter — that what a great mind thought about the structure of reality is still worth understanding, still worth arguing with, still worth the effort it demands.Avicenna demanded everything of his own intellect, across a life of political turbulence, exile, and unceasing work. This book asks only that you follow where his thinking leads. Read more