Great Medieval Thinkers: Avicenna

"Yes, that’s right. This is why I picked my second book, which is Jon McGinnis’s Avicenna (2010)—a straightforward title. There are lots of good books on Avicenna. The reason that I’ve picked this one is because I think it is the best introduction to all aspects of his thought. It’s a very readable, solid, reliable introduction that is also very interesting. It gets into some areas that some introductions don’t, where McGinnis is particularly strong. He has worked extensively on natural philosophy, so he covers that quite well. I really had to have a book on Avicenna because he’s the most important figure in the philosophy of the Islamic world. In general, philosophical traditions develop incrementally. You have commentaries or other types of books, and then people respond to them; there’s a back and forth debate. Then, occasionally, someone comes along and he or she doesn’t necessarily say ‘forget all this,’ but responds to what’s been going on in such an original, decisive, and pioneering way that, after that, it’s almost as if everything restarts. If you think, for example, of what Plato and Aristotle did—they effectively rendered the pre-Socratics irrelevant by co-opting their ideas, to the point where their texts are now almost entirely lost. “The Stoics died out, the Epicureans died out, the Sceptics died out, and the only thing left was Platonism” Or if you think about Plotinus in Late Antiquity, he came up with such a powerful new way of understanding Platonism that it swept away all of the other rival schools: the Stoics died out, the Epicureans died out, the Sceptics died out, and the only thing left was Platonism. For centuries, all the figures after him were Platonists. Or maybe a more familiar example would be Kant . You have modern philosophy developing—you have empiricism and rationalism, and so on. And then—bam!—enter Kant. I think many analytic philosophers would see the history of philosophy, insofar as it is relevant to them, as beginning with Kant, because everything that came before him was rendered superfluous by the fact that his concepts and agenda set the stage for what came after. Avicenna was the person who intervened in the whole tradition and said: ‘here’s how we’re going to do this from now on.’ He had his own distinctive vocabulary and arguments which set the agenda for the whole remaining Islamic tradition, but were also very influential in Jewish and Christian medieval thought. For me, he’s the most important medieval thinker of any religious persuasion. He would probably have seen himself as an Aristotelian and his critics saw him that way. They called him and his followers ‘peripatetics’ to make that point. He responded to Aristotle in a very intricate way, engaging with all his works. He even structured his books in imitation of Aristotle’s. But, at the same time, he was very self-consciously original. Effectively, what he did was take Aristotle’s questions and give them new answers. He made lots of very important changes. For example, he made big leaps forward in logic. Probably the easiest way to understand why he is so important is that he rethought metaphysics in a way that really centres everything on the idea of existence. He updated metaphysics to make it more suitable for a culture which believed in monotheism and creationism. His idea was: ‘well, what is God really? God is the source of existence. So we need to start from existence in thinking about how metaphysics works.’ That’s not really something you see in Aristotle, because Aristotle didn’t consider it possible for something to be brought to existence from nothing. For him, metaphysics was the study of substances that came to be through the changing of other substances—like blood being brought together to form a foetus, which becomes a human. In contrast, for Avicenna, metaphysics needs to handle the idea of God giving existence to everything else. He then made a distinction between God as the necessary existent—i.e. something that has to exist by its very nature or essence—and other things which are not necessary, but only contingent. What that means is that by their nature or essence, they might exist or they might not exist. “This is a very powerful way of rethinking what God is and how God relates to everything else” For example, take me: if you analyse my essence—I’m a human and you analyse what it means to be human—you’ll see that there’s nothing about being human that guarantees existing. I could exist, I could not exist, I used to not exist, there could be no humans at all. But there are humans, and this calls out for an explanation. For Avicenna, this explanation leads to a primary cause of existence which exists by its very nature and that’s God. This is a very powerful way of rethinking what God is and how God relates to everything else. It is a central example of the kind of thing he does which then totally determines later philosophy because, especially the Islamic world but also people like Aquinas, they then respond to this idea and think this is a really good way of thinking about God."