Ibn Sina
A child prodigy who mastered medicine at sixteen and philosophy by eighteen. He wandered Persia, writing the books that shaped medieval thought.
Ibn Sina was born near Bukhara and showed extraordinary ability from childhood. By sixteen he was treating patients. By eighteen he had read every book available to him. He spent his adult life moving between Persian courts, serving as physician and vizier, writing at night, sometimes on the run. His Canon of Medicine was the standard textbook in Europe for five centuries. His Book of Healing synthesized Aristotelian and Neoplatonic ideas into a system that made the existence of God a matter of logical necessity. His thought dominated Islamic philosophy for generations and provoked Al-Ghazali's famous attack.
Places
Ideas
Words
“The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired until one knows the causes.”
“The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion, and men who have religion and no wit.”
Works
Life & Moments
Born near Bukhara
Born in Afshana, a village near Bukhara in what is now Uzbekistan. His father was a government official. The boy was extraordinary from the start: he had memorized the Quran by age ten.
Mastering Medicine by Sixteen
By sixteen he had mastered medicine so thoroughly that established physicians came to study with him. He treated the Samanid sultan and was rewarded with access to the royal library, which he devoured.
The Canon of Medicine and The Book of Healing
Wrote the Canon of Medicine, which became the standard medical textbook in both the Islamic world and Europe for over five hundred years. The Book of Healing was his philosophical encyclopedia, covering logic, physics, mathematics, and metaphysics.
Death in Isfahan
Died in Hamadan at fifty-seven, worn out by years of overwork and political turmoil. He had served as court physician and vizier to various rulers, often writing on horseback between cities. His last years were spent in Isfahan under the protection of its ruler.
Influence
Influenced by
- Al-Farabi
Ibn Sina read Al-Farabi's commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics and said it finally opened the text to him.
- Al-Biruni
Al-Biruni and Ibn Sina exchanged sharp letters debating the nature of the heavens and the limits of Aristotle.
- Galen
Ibn Sina absorbed and systematized Galen's medical corpus into his own Canon of Medicine, the standard medical textbook across the Islamic world and, in Latin translation, European universities for over five hundred years.
- Al-Razi
Ibn Sina built on al-Razi's clinical legacy in the Canon while rejecting his metaphysics of five eternal principles, faulting him for straying past what a physician could establish.
Influenced
- Al-Ghazali
Al-Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers was aimed primarily at Ibn Sina's metaphysics.
- Suhrawardi
Suhrawardi built his philosophy of illumination on Avicenna's logic before turning it toward light and vision.
- Nasir al-Din al-Tusi
Al-Tusi defended Avicenna's philosophy against its critics and carried his thought into a new age.
- Omar Khayyam
Khayyam described himself as a student of Ibn Sina's philosophy, translated part of his work and defended his metaphysics, a side of him largely hidden behind the quatrains.
- Fakhr al-Din al-Razi
Fakhr al-Din's commentary on Ibn Sina's Pointers and Reminders is so persistently critical that later readers called it a slander rather than a commentary. Yet it fixed Avicenna's text as the thing every later philosopher had to answer.
