Avicenna's 'De Anima' in the Latin West

"Absolutely. One of the reasons I picked it, though, is that it’s not about metaphysics. People who are familiar with Avicenna might think that that is his main legacy, but actually he has legacies in many areas of philosophy. He was incredibly original and pioneering in pretty much every area other than ethics and political philosophy (on which he didn’t have that much to say). One thing that’s interesting about the transmission of Arabic philosophy into Latin is that very early on they translated Avicenna’s work on the soul— De anima means ‘On the Soul’—and we call Aristotle’s work on the soul De anima as well. But actually there were several generations in the Latin world where they were reading Avicenna and thinking about Avicenna more than they were thinking about Aristotle, or where they were thinking about Aristotle through Avicenna. His conception of the soul became a kind of touchstone for scholastic medieval philosophy, even to the point that it was more important than Aristotle’s own psychology in the early thirteenth century. This is very surprising, but true. This was before we get to more famous figures like Aquinas. In this book, Dag Nikolaus Hasse talks about the translations: who did them, and how they were done. This is already very interesting: it’s another example of the collaboration between people of different religions. We’re talking about another translation movement—into Latin. This was done in Spain and it involved Muslims, Jews, and Christians—especially Jews and Christians—working together. So you’d have maybe a Jewish Arabic speaker and a Christian Latin speaker and they would collaborate to produce a translation. “Arabic philosophy was hugely informative and influential in the Latin medieval world” Hasse talks about how Avicenna’s work, On The Soul, was translated in the first place into Latin, and he goes through issues that arise in Avicenna’s On The Soul and talks about them one after another, topic by topic. One of them, which is really cool and that you and I have discussed before for a Philosophy Bites podcast , is Avicenna’s famous Flying Man Argument. The idea is that God creates, in mid-air, a human being that has never existed previously. It is a mature, healthy, full-grown human being, not a baby (if you don’t like the God part, you don’t need God to be involved, you could just say a human being appears in mid-air). We’ll just say ‘he’ because Avicenna seems to think of it as a man. He is either falling or floating or flying, that’s why it’s usually called the Flying Man Argument. He’s in mid-air and his arms and legs are stretched out, and his fingers are splayed, so that he’s not in contact with his own body. Avicenna says that his eyesight is veiled, but if you want you could just say he’s in the dark. So there’s nothing for him to see and there’s no noise whistling by, there’s nothing to smell, and he can’t taste anything. In a way, what Avicenna is describing here, is a situation of sensory deprivation. Even then—here comes the clever part—Avicenna says this person would be aware of his own existence. What that shows is that you have a way of being aware of yourself or your soul which doesn’t involve the body. Then he says that proves that the soul is immaterial. There has been a lot of debate about this argument. Hasse has a really interesting discussion, not only of how the argument was received in the Latin world, but also of how he thinks the argument is supposed to work. He does something that I have some sympathy with, which is to point out that Avicenna doesn’t label it as a proof : he labels it as a hint or indication. The point of that, Hasse thinks, is that it’s not really supposed to be a demonstration that your soul is immaterial, so much as an indication that you could imagine someone being aware of their own soul without being aware of their body and that can help you see that the two things are not necessarily the same. So, in a way, Hasse is one of the interpreters who tries to lower the bar on what Avicenna is doing, to make the argument more successful. His analysis of the argument is well worth reading: it’s one of the most lucid and philosophically impressive discussions of the Flying Man Argument that you get in the secondary literature. In addition to that, he then tells you what all the Latin philosophers thought about it and how they thought the example worked. In general, he makes the point that Arabic philosophy was hugely informative and influential in the Latin medieval world. As I’ve said, in some cases, Avicenna’s influence even outstripped that of Aristotle. Exactly. It wasn’t a permanent state of affairs: eventually they started reading Aristotle over Avicenna; but Avicenna really never stopped being important. Scotus and Ockham, who were later scholastics, both explicitly referred to Avicenna when they were arguing in support of some of their most central ideas. For example, in the debate about universals and whether universals are real, Scotus was a realist and Ockham a nominalist. They both claimed to be agreeing with Avicenna. One thing that’s interesting about that is that a lot of the same debates happened in the Islamic world and developed in parallel to Latin scholastic philosophy, but this is mostly unknown in scholarship because people don’t usually read later Islamic philosophy. No, or at least they don’t seem to have felt that it was worse than using Aristotle. They knew that Aristotle wasn’t a Christian, and they also knew that he taught some problematic things–for example that the world was eternal. Interestingly, even though Aquinas had some very rude things to say about the prophet Mohammed, neither he nor other medieval philosophers in the Christian tradition seem to found it particularly problematic to use ideas from Muslims or Jews. If there was a problem, the problem was using ideas from non-Christians generally or even just using ideas that weren’t in the Bible. That definitely was a source of contention and debate. Still, even as concerns the general question, ‘Can we use pagan or non-Christian philosophers?’ it’s clear that there was a powerful agreement across the whole scholastic world that this was a good thing to do. The only real problem was what you were supposed to do if one of these people like Aristotle or Averroes or Avicenna taught something unacceptable. They would distinguish very carefully between teachings of these figures that weren’t okay and the rest. “Avicenna said that, in theory, humans could be spontaneously generated like flies and worms” One nice example that Hasse mentions is that Avicenna said that, in theory, humans could be spontaneously generated like flies and worms. He’s not saying it necessarily happened, but he says that, in theory, it could happen. Everyone said ‘no no this is a terrible thing to say!’ They didn’t like the idea that natural processes could give rise to humans, the way flies did (they thought that flies spontaneously generated from rotting meat). Avicenna says, ‘if you include flies and worms, then in principle why not humans?’ And although the Christian philosophers were unanimous in rejecting that, as far as I know, (and Averroes too thought that it was a ridiculous idea) they didn’t then say ‘forget Avicenna.’ They took the 99% of him that was useful and said on this one point he was completely wrong. A similar thing happened in relation to Aristotle, Averroes and Maimonides."