Avicenna

Portrait of Avicenna from a Tajik banknote.

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“”Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.

—Avicenna, being heartily sick of sophist idiots.[1]

Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā (c. 980–1037), commonly known in the Middle East as Ibn Sīnā and in the West by his Latinized name Avicenna, was a Persian (not Arab) polymath and scholar of damn near everything and had a brain the size of a planet. He is renowned in the Middle East the way the greatest of the ancient Greeks are in the West, as a part of the Islamic Golden Age. He was a prolific physician considered crucial in the history of medicine.

He was considered one of the "virtuous pagans" by Florentine writer Dante Alighieri, appearing in Limbo in The Divine Comedy alongside Aristotle, Julius Caesar, Ovid, and Saladin.[2]

## Medicine[edit]

Amongst his 150 surviving treatises on various topics, at least 40 are on medicine. He compiled The Canon of Medicine, his 14-volume medical encyclopedia, which remained a medical authority for several hundred years and was used as a set text in European medical schools until the 18th century. This was at the cutting edge of medical knowledge in his time, but is now used mostly as an excuse and an appeal to long history by alternative medicine practitioners, which is far less than he deserves.

Some consider him to be one of the founding figures of modern medicine.[citation needed]

## Religious beliefs[edit]

Avicenna advanced the "Proof of the Truthful", which is a kind of ontological argument or transcendental argument for God. He argues that there must be something that cannot not exist, which can be identified with God. He made the Floating man argument, which argues that a man, floating in air with nothing else, would still know that he has a soul, an argument-by-presence.

Avicenna remains somewhat controversial in Islam. He criticized many views of Islam and veered from orthodox teachings. For this reason, many Muslims consider him a kafir (a disbeliever). At the same time, Avicenna's philosophy is influential, for which many herald him as a landmark figure in Muslim intellectualism.

## References[edit]

1. ↑ Avicenna, Metaphysics, I; commenting on Aristotle, Topics I.11.105a4–5.
2. ↑ Inferno, Canto IV, Line 143

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